![]() ![]() Adafruit have a tutorial which shows how to wire up a Trinket to act as a USB HID along with a couple of code examples.įirst step is to try out the Adafruit tutorial on some breadboard – if you get stuck head over to the forums where Frank can help – to get this to work on my Mac I needed to plug the USB cable into a USB 2 port directly (not via a hub) and use the experimental library. This is based on the Adafruit USB Trinket – a very cut down minimalist Arduino clone (it runs some simple Arduino code no problem, but needs it’s own version of the programmer tool). If you’re opting for total neatness you can also solder the USB wires directly to the underside of the Trinket as there are some surface mount tabs.Ī costlier but wireless alternative to the Trinket is the Adafruit Bluefruit EZ HID keyboard controller again available from Pimoroni in the UK. This project does require a bit of soldering – I opted to solder the pins onto the the trinket, and then attach the wires using female jumper cables – for a neater build you could solder the wires directly between the cherry keys and Trinket. Craft knife, dremel, soldering iron, multimeter with continuity tester.A suitable box (the one I used was a little on the small size – something 6cm x 3cm x 3cm might be better).An Adafruit USB trinket (5v) In the UK available from Pimoroni.If you shop around for the parts you can build this for less than £15. I did find a couple of programmable USB keystrips that offered similar functionality, but these were a bit expensive and lacked mechanical keys. The blue Cherry MX keys are illuminated, and for 10 seconds when you first plug it in you can remap them to almost anything (including words and short phrases). For example the ArcEm emulator that runs on the Raspberry Pi RISC OS requires both left and right windows keys to be pressed simultaneously to exit.įortunately to the rescue is this – the smallest USB mechanical keyboard in the world (probably): Now I just need a portal gun You can of course usually find a way round these limitations by hitting control and frantically hammering in the number of the function key (if you can remember it) – but sometimes that doesn’t work. Or you might be re-purposing a keyboard for a use it wasn’t really designed for – I have a lovely chicklet keyboard with my Raspberry Pi Motorola Lapdock hack which lacks both left and right windows keys. Sometimes it’s annoying when your favourite old school mechanical keyboard lacks some of the modern function keys that we’ve grown used to using in recent years. ![]()
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