Macropads can be as simple as a few buttons hooked up to a microcontroller to do the USB HID dance and talk to a PC. However, you can go a lot further, too. [CNCDan] demonstrates this well with his sleek macropad build, which throws haptic feedback into the mix. The build features six programmable macro […]
Why press many button when few button do trick? That was the thinking of [Bike Cook Robots] when it came time to revamp his desk. To that end, he whipped up a tidy macropad to make daily computing tasks easier. The build is based around an Adafruit RP2040 Feather ThinkInk devboard, chosen because it plugs […]
Some people are not merely satisfied with functionality, or even just good looks. These persnickety snoots (I am one of them) seek something elegant, a true marriage of form and function. Image by [YANG SHU] via Hackaday.IO Should such a person be in the market for a macro pad (or ‘macropad’ if you prefer), that […]
Last time, I described how to write a simple Android app and get it talking to your code on Linux. So, of course, we need an example. Since I’ve been on something of a macropad kick lately, I decided to write a toolkit for building your own macropad using App Inventor and any sort of […]
Last time, I showed you how to throw together a few modules and make a working macropad that could act like a keyboard or a mouse. My prototype was very simple, so there wasn’t much to debug. But what happens if you want to do something more complex? In this installment, I’ll show you how […]
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 […]
Image by [Sasha K.] via reddit Remember that lovely Hacktric centerfold from a couple Keebins ago with the Selectric keycaps? Yeah you do. Well, so does [Sasha K.], who saw the original reddit post and got inspired. [Sasha K.] has more than one IBM Selectric lying around, which is a nice problem to have, and […]
It’s been a minute since I featured a tiny keyboard, and that’s okay. But if you want to get your feet wet in the DIY keyboarding community, making a little macro pad like [Arnov Sharma]’s Paste Pal is a great place to start. Image by [Arnov Sharma] via Hackaday.IO This is a follow-up to his […]
[Jeremy Weatherford] clearly has a knack for explaining projects well enough for easy reproduction but goes way further than most and has created a four-part YouTube series detailing every step from project inception to the final assembly, covering all aspects of 3D modelling and PCB design for a custom MacroPad design. Many tools are introduced along […]