Shortcut Keyboard - Extended

Just a quick update to my shortcut keyboard.
I really started to use this while at work and found it really useful but there weren't enough buttons so I had an idea to double the size by getting some new acrylic fronts and backs made that were double the width and held two PCBs next to each other.

There are enough inputs left on the Arduino to connect the second set of buttons so no need for another Arduino.

I use Sketchup a lot and now I can attach several commands to the second set of buttons.

Finished Shortcut Keyboard

The Acrylic tops and bottoms arrived yesterday for the keyboard so I thought I'd update the blog with a picture of the finished item side by side with the concept design,
I must say I'm quite pleased with it, the holes actually line up with the buttons :-).

Finished article

3D concept design

Time saving Keyboard shortcuts for the PC

It's been quite a while since my last post but sometimes life throws you a curved ball and changes your focus for a time.  Anyway this little project came about due to a friend at work having to replace his PC keyboard but not being able to find one with single pre-programmed buttons for copy and paste, as did his current one, and I said " I can do that with an Arduino".

So the idea was to use an Arduino Leonardo clone that can emulate a mouse or keyboard and then program the keyboard sequences to be triggered from the press of a button.  Initially I was going to do just the copy, cut and paste but as I was going to use the standard 5cm x 5cm Seeedstudio PCB service I thought I could add some more buttons.

I decided to do a PCB with six momentary push buttons, mainly because they were what I had in my box of components.

The botom row, blue, black and white buttons are copy, cut and paste respectively and I assigned the red, amber and green buttons to change the background colour of Excel cells to match the button colour (this was a request from another friend at work who uses Excel a lot)

The buttons could have any combination of key-presses assigned to them I suppose, 'Ctrl+Z' for undo etc.

Circuit Diagram

The connections are a bit out of order due to pinswaps on the PCB!

I used the "Sick of Beige" 50mm x 50mm PCB template from Seeedstudio as I intend to use their Acrylic laser cutting service to create a top and bottom box to house the keyboard.

Keypad Concept

Due to space availability I placed the Leonardo PCB on the underside of the PCB, this did mean that it was a bit fiddly soldering the pins for the Leonardo as I didn't want any pins sticking through the PCB into the body of the switch so solder the pins first and make sure they are flush with the button side surface, NOT protruding.

Make sure the pins don't go too far through.

The pins can be trimmed

Everything is powered by the USB lead plugged into the PC and there is an optional SMD or 3mm TPH LED on the button side that connects to a PWM capable IO pin, I set this to indicate power at 7% duty cycle and then pulse to 78% duty cycle for 50mS whenever a key is pressed.

I've ordered the acrylic tops and bottoms from Seeedstudio but they've yet to arrive.

All the files, including the Eagle schematic, PCB, gerber files and the sketch are here.

New Arduino Leonardo

Another board from Arduino.cc

Arduino have announced another micro-controller board based on a new ATmega32u4, this processor also takes care of the serial communications with the host PC negating the need for a separate serial to USB chip.

There are a few other differences between this board and the trusty UNO: -

• A micro USB connector. At last!
• The SPI bus on the ISP connector no-longer uses any IO pins.
• The device will act as a USB keyboard or mouse to the host PC.
• The board is available with or without the headers, without being slightly cheaper.

I looked at some UK suppliers but they were not showing availability until the 11th of June so it might be worth getting your pre-orders in now.

Also there is an update to the Arduino IDE available, this adds support for the Leonardo as well as multiple language support as well as other changes.

Download link here

Release notes here