I recently picked up one of those cheap macropads (and wrote about it, of course). It is surprisingly handy and quite inexpensive. But I felt bad about buying it. Something like that should be easy to build yourself. People build keyboards all the time now, and with a small number of keys, you don’t even […]
You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from […]
One of the most paradoxical aspects of creating art is the fact that constraints, whether arbitrary or real, and whether in space, time, materials, or rules, often cause creativity to flourish rather than to wither. Picasso’s blue period, Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, Tetris, and even the Volkswagen Beetle are all famous examples of constraint-driven artistic […]
In the heat of the moment, gamers live and die by the speed and user-friendliness of their input mechanisms. If you’re team PC, you have two controllers to worry about. Lots of times, players will choose a separate gaming keyboard over the all-purpose 104-banger type. When [John Silvia]’s beloved Fang game pad went to that […]
If you want to add a keypad to your Arduino project, the options are pretty limited. There’s that red and blue 4×4 membrane we’ve all seen in password-protected door lock projects, and the phone layout version that does pretty much all the same tricks. Isn’t it time for a full Arduino-compatible keyboard? [ELECTRONOOBS] thinks so. […]
You’ve seen a landline phone converted into a Bluetooth headset. There’s nothing new there. It’s great for confusing kids when asking them to dial a rotary phone, but that’s about it. It’s the same phone, built by Ma Bell for fifty years, converted with a little Bluetooth breakout board. You’ve never seen a landline conversion […]
Right up front, let us stipulate that we are not making fun of this project. Even its maker admits that it has no practical purpose. But this 3D-printed Commodore-style rotary dial keypad fails to be practical on so many levels that it’s worth celebrating. And indeed, celebrating deprecated technology appears to be what [Jan Derogee] […]