obsolete topic lock

[berserkfan]

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[FrostyToast]

I think this might be a thread that you would be interested in.

[Melvang]

Keeping an eye on this thread.

[berserkfan]

I think this might be a thread that you would be interested in.

tankfulloffoxes made it seem much harder than it ought to be. What's that stuff about scraping PCBs and potentiolometers? 

At least his earliest post, I can understand. Remove original innards. Dremel. Put in jailhouse blues. Attach firmly with hot glue. Solder leads to teensy.

The thumb keys I have no idea what to do. But since I have unused old metal plates I guess I could cut out a matrix of 4 and use that to mount 4 cherry switches on the side and epoxy them when I'm done?

What about the teensy? I know that in theory I could direct wire, but how does that work? There are 2 leads per switch.

The end result won't be pretty, but as long as I can use it that's ok.

BTW, he had an awesome quote that, despite his very few posts, make him 100% qualified to be a geekhacker.

tankfulloffoxes described his project as: "Easy peasy lemon squeezy!"

[FrostyToast]

I think this might be a thread that you would be interested in.

tankfulloffoxes made it seem much harder than it ought to be. What's that stuff about scraping PCBs and potentiolometers? 

At least his earliest post, I can understand. Remove original innards. Dremel. Put in jailhouse blues. Attach firmly with hot glue. Solder leads to teensy.

The thumb keys I have no idea what to do. But since I have unused old metal plates I guess I could cut out a matrix of 4 and use that to mount 4 cherry switches on the side and epoxy them when I'm done?

What about the teensy? I know that in theory I could direct wire, but how does that work? There are 2 leads per switch.

The end result won't be pretty, but as long as I can use it that's ok.

BTW, he had an awesome quote that, despite his very few posts, make him 100% qualified to be a geekhacker.

tankfulloffoxes described his project as: "Easy peasy lemon squeezy!"

From my extremely limited knowledge of engineering, potentiometers are used to detect a signal between something like 5v and ground. This does some analog doo-hickey and this is just because he wants to have an analog stick on the side.
That mumbo jumbo has nothing to do with the actual modding to cherry switches.

[neverused]

You could tie all the switches to a common ground and then hook up the other pin of each switch an I/O of the teensy. Then you just have your code perform an action if pulled LOW. Personally I think the few extra pennies for the diodes and being able to adapt existing firmware had merit.

If you wanted to use an arduino based approach, I can likely give you some pointers too.

[berserkfan]

You could tie all the switches to a common ground and then hook up the other pin of each switch an I/O of the teensy. Then you just have your code perform an action if pulled LOW. Personally I think the few extra pennies for the diodes and being able to adapt existing firmware had merit.

If you wanted to use an arduino based approach, I can likely give you some pointers too.

Diodes are cheap.

Gutz's soldering skills when he has to wire up extra diodes... no comment.

but you are saying that I need to wire 20 switch leads to one single Ground on the teensy, and 20 direct wire to individual spots? That sounds harder to do than doing up a standard diodes matrix.

[neverused]

It'll definitely turn into a spaghetti mess of wires. A matrix may be your best bet

[berserkfan]

It'll definitely turn into a spaghetti mess of wires. A matrix may be your best bet

So the main finger cluster should have 5+3 leads if I use a matrix, and the thumb cluster can have 4 leads directly? That makes 12 places on the teensy to solder to if I choose to go the matrix route? That sounds much more appealing.

Did I count right?

[neverused]

4 leads directly wired can be thought of as a 4X1 matrix if you will.

[dorkvader]

4 leads directly wired can be thought of as a 4X1 matrix if you will.

you would need 5 leads for a 4*1 matrix directly wired.

Soarers controller and converter support "hardwired" switches. This was for the use of footpedals and the like. I have used my one handed ergodox (that I usually use as a gamepad) for one handed typing and it's not all that bad (I stole matias's one handed layout, though the xkcd layout might work well here also.

[neverused]

4 leads directly wired can be thought of as a 4X1 matrix if you will.

you would need 5 leads for a 4*1 matrix directly wired.

Soarers controller and converter support "hardwired" switches. This was for the use of footpedals and the like. I have used my one handed ergodox (that I usually use as a gamepad) for one handed typing and it's not all that bad (I stole matias's one handed layout, though the xkcd layout might work well here also.

True, I was neglecting ground when I was talking about 4 leads.

[Oobly]

It's worth it to also put diodes on the thumb keys and include them in the diode matrix. That way you only use 1 more wire for the 4 buttons as either a new column or row of 4. That makes a matrix of 5x4, so it only uses 9 pins on the Teensy.

There are a bunch of firmwares you can modify for a custom board layout. I used a version of a Phantom firmware, but there's also TMK (lots of features) and a bunch of others. Just check the way you wire the matrix matches the firmware you use (row or column driven, signal level or pulled to gnd for sensing).

If you use a frimware that already has layer support you can modify it for single hand typing by putting half the characters on a 2nd layer (AFAIK, mirrored character layout work best due to using the same finger for the character of the "missing" hand).

[tankfulloffoxes]

Hey there.  Regarding the potentiometer, that was just an explanation of how analog sticks work, and how to modify them so they act as a simple key press.  However, I have no experience with teensy's so I'm no help there. 

Regarding the cherry switches where the dpad is, you'll be hard pressed to fit everything in there without making the keyboard awkward to use.  You may try looking at the switches used for the old arcade games.  I believe they're called knife switches.  Either that, or try something similar to what the data hand used.  Either way, or looking at a bit of fabrication. 

I've been commissioned to do a few more of these, but I'd rather use teensy's than buying an n52 every time, so I'll be keeping up with this thread.