Piano Box Is A Digital Synthesizer Made Of Paper

March 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

We love the look of this papercraft piano which [Catarina] built along with some friends at NYC Resistor, a hackerspace in the big apple. It starts off as a cubic black box with a white top. But just lift that top as [Catarina] does in the video after the break and three of the sides fall flat to reveal a pair of speakers and the single-octave keyboard.

The key’s don’t move when you press them. Instead, she decided to use the CapSense Arduino library to implement touch sensitive keys. Each key is made up of a plane of copper foil tape, with a strip of tape running back to the center of the box where it is interfaced with an Arduino Mega hidden there. The Tone library produces the waveforms which are played by the speakers, and a set of LEDs on the upright side of the box illuminate the keyboard diagram as you press each key. You can see that there are short white bars on that display which correspond to the black keys on the keyboard.

If you take a look at the code, you’ll see the libraries really make the code for the project simple.

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Isomorphic Piano Keyboard Is Button Madness

March 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[nikescar] sent in a link to a huge isomorphic MIDI keyboard. We might have missed it the first time around, but that doesn’t diminish such a great looking project.

According to the project page, this humongous keyboard is the work people at Louisville Soundbuilders’ efforts to clone the AXiS-64 MIDI controller. Instead of looking like a ‘normal’ piano keyboard, this isomorphic keyboard puts notes in a hexagonal pattern. This keyboard layout is very useful – fingerings for chords are the same across all keys – but these keyboard layouts are fairly rare and MIDI controllers are expensive as a result.

To make the keyboard in the video velocity sensitive, there are two layers of PCBs. The top layer uses Cherry key switches, while the bottom PCB is an array of tact switches. Measuring the time between the top and bottom key presses gives the on board microcontroller velocity information that is converted to MIDI notes. This setup has a few downsides, namely the huge amount of switches, components, and pins needed for two keyboard matrices.

The project page hasn’t been updated for a few months, so we’re pretty curious about the current status of this build. If any of the Louisville Soundbuilders have an update on this project, send it on in.

Using The Nook As A Keyboard

March 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

[Andrew] has been pining for an Optimus Maximus – a keyboard with a small LCD screen in each key – for years. Like a lot of people, he love the idea of a completely configurable keyboard, but balked at the two thousand dollar price tag. Although it doesn’t have full color OLED screens behind each key, [Andrew]’s nook simple touch can be used as a keyboard just the same.

After rooting his new nook, [Andrew] had a very nice tablet computer, and the only Android device with an e-ink screen. Although[Andrew] never wrote an Android app before, he wanted to do a proof of concept build to see if a nook keyboard would actually work. The “keyboard app” is actually just a webpage hosted on his home server. When he presses a virtual key, JavaScript sends an ASCII value back to the server where it is decoded and sent to xte.

[Andrew] says his build works, but not very well. Opera mini doesn’t like the homebrew server he set up, and Cyrillic characters are a no go. Still, it works, and looks like an awesome application for an e-ink tablet with a proper Android app. Demo after the break.

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Control Your PC With A Remote

March 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Because his computer is gradually turning into an all-inclusive media display device, [Shawn] figured a remote to control the volume and a video playlist would be a reasonable addition. TV remotes for computers have been around for years, but [Shawn] decided to go the DIY route and build his own computer remote.

For the build, [Shawn] used a Teensy dev board with an IR receiver module and the requisite infrared remote library. To translate infrared signals to keyboard commands,[Shawn] decided to base his project off a previous build that used a small program called AutoHotKey.

Right now the build can cycle through a pre-defined YouTube and Shoutcast playlist and change the volume of the currently playing track. There’s also support for moving the mouse with directional buttons on the remote, but we’re wondering if a better implementation would be using the Windows multimedia keyboard scan codes that should be supported by [Shawn]’s laptop.

Still, [Shawn] managed a very nice build that would fit into our computer battlestations quite nicely. Check out the demo of the remote in action after the break.

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Winning Video Games By Letting Arduino Push Your Buttons

February 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Lars] shows you how to get a perfect score on the first four levels of BIT.TRIP RUNNER by using an Arduino to time and send button presses. This is a pretty simple game that uses a couple of buttons to jump or slide past obstacles. The constant speed of the character makes it quite easy to time these movements without any input from the game. This means that the pixel sampling which some web-game bots use isn’t really necessary here. Just work out the timing and hard-code it into the sketch. As you’ll see after the break, it works perfectly

The real value of this hack is the guide he wrote to send key presses from the Arduino hardware. It’s not hard at all, but there are several steps and this will get you up and running in no time. Where might you go from here? It wouldn’t take much to turn this into a keyboard prank that misspells all your words.

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Doing It Right With A Morse Code Keyboard

February 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Hackaday has seen dozens of Morse code keyboards over the years, but [Hudson] at NYC Resistor finally managed to give that idea the justice it deserves. He built a USB Morse code keyboard with the same type of telegraph key the pros use.

For his project, [Hudson] got his hands on a wonderful iambic paddle that is usually hooked up to CW rigs. Unlike previous Morse keyboards we’ve seen, [Hudson] used iambic paddles, a telegraph key with one lever for dits and another for dahs. Because the dits and dahs are separate electrical connections, it’s extremely easy for the microcontroller – a Teensy – to parse the Morse code and send the correct letter to the computer.

[Hudson] also added some audio feedback for the dits and dahs, and designed a laser-cut enclosure for the Teensy and speaker. Check out the video of the iambic keyer keyboard in action after the break.
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Microswitch Keyboard Gives Those Lazy Thumbs A Workout

February 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Upon first sight there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is a hacker’s keyboard. [Tim Tyler] built the odd-looking conglomeration of keys a few years ago with the goal of improving the man-machine interface. Why waste all that thumb space with just one long keyboard when you can have at least nine keys per thumb?

After some additional consideration this isn’t all that unorthodox. We’ve seen keyboards that split the hands; in fact you can buy them. This just adds the thumb matrices and that rack of programmable keys above the alpha-numeric portion. It’s rather organ-like with its multiple ranks, don’t you think? Check out the demonstration video after the break. It certainly has a keystroke sound that is all its own. The sound is different from the clackity “M” keyboard and its modern relatives thanks to the microswitches that make up each key.

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