FABI - Flexible Assistive Button Interface

We used this case for quite a long time. Unfortunately, the price of ~2.5$ is (of course compared to the total cost) quite high.

The solution was a little bit of shopping at Ali.

I requested a quote for 50 cases, including the drilling of all holes (decreases the construction kit complexity) and: its the same price :-).

If you drill the holes on your own, the price is half of the original case.

It's quite easy, just write the guys at szomk (enclosure manufacturer) and you get all the necessary drawings to send them a draft of your plans.

Let's see how the quality will be, if the cases arrive.

If everything is fine, we will assemble a construction which will be sold at www.hackerspaceshop.com.

Maybe you know the problems of working with different keyboard shortcuts or key combinations which are often used.

You might experienced the same problem if you are located in a German speaking country and you have to program code: Most of the brackets are located on annoying positions (e.g. { is Alt Right + 7).

The solution is FABI!

You can setup 6 buttons in a part of wood and configure them to support your mainly used shortcuts.

It's possible to assign copy&paste, if/for/while combinations and also different shortcuts for other programs (e.g. Jump frames in a video editing software).

This is the setup I use:

Please note, that different keyboard layouts by your Host-PC are only supported by the Teensy microcontroller. The Arduinos don't provide different layouts by now.

Some extra pictures of the build:

I know, this is more of a dirty hack, but it's quite useful for me :-)

If you dig a little bit deeper to the configuration software, you will find the possibility to use different key setups with so called slots.