Friday, June 04, 2021

00756, Walnut HID

I'm making a human interface design (imagine a funky keyboard) for a colleague for improved accessability. I've gone off on one and now I have a system of adding buttons to pieces of wood (or anything else I can make holes in) by drilling them, slotting in a plastic cylinder which holds a button and then wire wrapping (rather than soldering) on to an Arduino Pro Micro microcontroller. Then the Pro Micro gets programmed as a keyboard and mouse with encoder buttons as mouse and buttons sending keyvboard shortcuts.

The current version is a small four button, one encoder version:



The challenge now is to get the most functionality out of all the inputs, for example by pressing and holding one of the buttons so that an led lights signalling that all the inputs are now in a different mode.
Thought about putting a tiny screen on it to replace the leds, but it's not so nice visually.

More build pics:




The button and encoder caddies are CNC'd and then cast in silicone, so that multiples can be made in resin:




Other HIDs that got made recently have been more organic:









Wire wrapping: