simulating chorded keyboards

[Mark Komarinski]

Second this.  Not all the Arduino family will do it but the Leonardo and Leonardo-compatible ones will.

-Mark

On October 14, 2014 3:16:17 PM EDT, Matt Minuti <matt.minuti at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'd strongly suggest looking at doing a little bit of hardware hacking
>via
>the Arduino Leonardo. It's trivially easy to make it show up as a
>generic
>USB HID keyboard, meaning no fancy driver concerns, no matter the OS.
>
>The keys could either be a handful (heh) of buttons laid out however he
>wants, or you could even use a PS/2 keyboard and have the Arduino
>interpret
>the keycodes and send the appropriate keypress signals via USB.
>
>A student of mine once made a Minecraft griefing controller: it
>basically
>had QWEASD, spacebar, shift, and a dedicated spamming button. The
>buttons
>worked as expected, sending keypresses, but the spam button sent the
>necessary keypresses to go into "talk" mode, write some nonsense like
>"HAHAHA n00b, you can't get me lol!!," and send it to everyone on the
>server. I'm sure the possibilites for good are even greater than such
>evil... :)
>
>On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 2:22 PM, David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> wrote:
>
>> Remember the MIDI son? This is a different son, Kyle, with a
>different
>> project. He's interested in chorded keyboards. You can find these
>here
>> and there online, but he wants to design his own. To start, he wants
>to
>> simulate one with a regular keyboard.
>>
>> We've been looking into ways to let him flexibly define keyboard
>input
>> (chords, modifier keys, etc) but without requiring a ton of low-level
>> programming.
>>
>> 1) A simple game engine (pygame, e.g.) that reports "key down" and
>"key
>> up" events rather than simply delivering a pressed key via something
>> like read(), getchar(), etc. He needs to get between these events to
>> figure out the "current chord". Even pygame is more programming than
>he
>> really wants to do, though.
>>
>> 2) xkeycaps looks like the opposite of what I want, but it's
>described
>> so poorly I can't tell for sure. It looks like I can generate
>multiple
>> keysyms from a single key press, but not vice versa.
>>
>> 3) emacs! This was actually my first suggestion, since it does almost
>> everything he wants. Of course, he'd have to learn emacs first.
>However,
>> there's another problem that I'm not sure can be overcome. Aren't
>emacs
>> sequences limited such that you can't have one be a prefix of
>another?
>>
>> For instance, he'd like to be able to do this:
>>
>>     'i' key down followed by 'i' key up: 'i'
>>     'i' down followed by 'k' down followed by 'i' and 'k' both up:
>'m'
>>
>> but with emacs you can have "i+k" mapped to m but then not 'i' mapped
>to
>> 'i'.
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>>
>
>
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