Okies, time for another update.
Also, sorry for the longer gaps between updates. I sometimes feel like waiting until more stuff works out. So here goes.
First off:
Once you start doing the electronics, I did discover one tip you may find useful. Since the LEDs are IR, you can't see whether they're turning on or not... but your phone camera likely can! The IR light shows up as a pale purple glow. That's useful for testing, although in actual use the LEDs have such a low duty cycle that it's hard to see anything even on a phone.
Awesome. That worked. At least in proving my point. And checking the soldered board LED connections.
It looks like you found and sourced some actual metal ball-head screws? And you machined the supports they screw into out of aluminum?
Well, credit for that goes to my nephew, Gereon, who now also ended up doing the soldering. But yeah, that part worked pretty neadly.
So, right. As I stated earlier, I tried my luck with PCBs, send the plans to the internet and, lo and behold, got some stuff back:
After soldering, the result looks rather nifty:
In the meantime, I continued my quest for the design of some useful hand rest. It took several iterations (skipping a few here):
That last (current) one now uses round magnets on the bottom of the board clamp, and those rectangular 1/8"*1/16" magnets of the original BOM in the clamp itself.
With all the experimentally oversized cables, it now looks like this:
I also use a whole lot of round magnets on the bottom, coupled with a near-complete plate of rubber:
Each of those round ones is about as strong as 2-3 of the rectangular ones, so that's a whole lot of magnetic power. So much so, I had to buy stronger glue.
Still, without the rubber it will still slide, as you mentioned. Polished steel on neodymium apparently has little traction.
Generally I would recommend the rubber solution. Only, it kinda stinks... :S
So far I managed to test the bus between two teensies and it seems they talk to each other just fine
. The LEDs of at least that one hand also glow as they should but nothing more was tested. I managed to fry my multimeter. As it turns out the 2 something Ampere the Teensy puts out is a little too much for the mA setting. But I need the mA thingy for everything that is not the Vcc line.
So, anyway, I intend to now move on to the software side of things.
Speaking of which, where is the code I can install on these devices? I went to some length as to not change the connectors on the Teensy itself, so whatever you're using
should work out of the box. With some luck. Maybe...
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Just stumbled upon the Azeron gaming keypad which seems to be inspired by the DataHand. It doesn't have the east and west clicks for each finger but it has an extra row of keys above the north ones. And since it's a gaming keypad it's not designed for typing and only has 26 keys per hand.
Has anyone here tried it? Even if it's not a perfect substitute for the DataHand I'm glad that that kind of design is starting to gain some traction.
Man, I gotta get me one of those. If they ever sell again. Who'd have thought people'd buy that in droves. Funky