When An Axe Isn’t Enough

November 19, 2009 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Chris] wanted a guitar with a keyboard but didn’t want a keytar. Like any good hacker he took a cheap guitar and a small keyboard and introduced them to each other. He moved the control knobs to make room for the keyboard and added the control circuitry from the keyboard to the top of the guitar’s body. A 9v battery is used to power the keys and something called “Chris Collins’ transformer trick” is used to amplify its sound. If you know details on this transformer, leave a comment and we’ll update the post. Take a look at the video after the break to see [Chris] perform the Final Countdown on keys and guitar.

The guitar is a Chinese made Telecaster clone and we think he’s the first one to find a realistic use for keyboards that don’t use full-sized keys. [Chris] apologizes for the lack of build photos but we give him a pass; he lost his phone while crowd-surfing and that’s as good an excuse as any for losing some pictures. We can’t wait to see another performance with this gnarly axe once he’s had enough practice to pull everything together!

Continue reading “When An Axe Isn’t Enough” →

Finally, A Keyboard For The IPhone

October 14, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 31 Comments

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We can’t say we’ve had problems typing on our iPhones here at HackaDay, must be the elfin fingers, but for [Ben Kurtz] it was a real pain. The obvious solution is to carry around an Arduino, 9 volt battery, iPhone breakout board, a ps2 keyboard, and of course the iPhone itself. Well, maybe it could be a little smaller with fewer parts, but at least it works. The Arduino reads input from the keyboard and converts it to serial, then the iPhone pulls the data via VNC. Like we said, a little roundabout, but we love the amount of ingenuity involved.

Connect A PS/2 Keyboard To A Microcontroller

September 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIiLE0BhE8]

The guys at Nerdkits have put together this tutorial on connecting a PS/2 keyboard to a microcontroller. Though this tutorial is written for one of the kits they sell, you should be able to apply this to pretty much any microcontroller. It is also a lesson in using interrupts instead of polling. They have several pre built examples ready to download as well as source code for the basic setup.

[via HackedGadgets]

Reverse Engineering USB Drivers

August 20, 2009 by Matt Schulz 17 Comments

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When [Jespersaur] purchased a Luxeed LED keyboard, he was disappointed to find that the drivers were not open source and didn’t support all the features he wanted. His solution? Hack the drivers that come with it, and implement his own. In his article, he gives a basic rundown of beginning reverse engineering by multiple methods and a brief introduction to libusb. For the Linux drivers, check out [Kurt Stephens]’s site, where he supplies a link to the source code, instructions on building it, and a tutorial on sending commands to the keyboard.

C64 USB Keyboard

July 6, 2009 by Steve Watkins 10 Comments

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[Maarten] told us about a C64 USB keyboard that was modified to be used as a standard input device. An interesting aspect of the project is the use of V-USB (formerly known as AVR-USB). V-USB is a software only approach to slow speed USB HID. In essence this is a two fold mod, The C64 keyboard is patched to a PC, and an off the shelf AVR is software-hacked to bit bang the USB communications. The author notes an initial problem with multiple key presses that was later corrected in the application. For the other side of the spectrum, we had covered the C64 twittering client, and a commodore 64 laptop.

Keykeriki: Wireless Keyboard Sniffer

June 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

[vimeo = 4990390]

Remote-Exploit.org is releasing Keykeriki, a wireless keyboard sniffer. The project is both open source hardware and software. you can download the files on their site. Right now you can’t get a pre made board, but they plan on releasing one soon. The system can be upgraded with “backpacks” or add on modules. One of these is going to be an LCD that displays the keystrokes of the keyboard you are sniffing. Another is supposed to serve as an interface to your iPhone. Right now it has the ability to decode Microsoft wireless keyboards, but the Logitech pieces should be added soon.

Keyboard Pants

May 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 44 Comments

kbpants

[Zach] sent us a link to his keyboard pants. Frankly, we were astonished, not only by his craftsmanship, but by the fact that we were working on a pair ourselves. Admittedly his are much better looking and ours will probably never be finished. The inspiration for both his and ours, was this sloppy version. [Zach’s] pair have been cut in half, and he never really found a convenient way to reconnect the two halves, so only the left works. Watch this video to see him playing some Tetris in his awesome shorts.