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• First forray for phonetic flapping

  JonKangas • 09/02/2023 at 05:27 • 0 comments

  Blink loaded and the light blinks. Woot!

  Adafruit KB remapper loaded and it successfully remaps all keys as if shift was stuck down! Success?

  Poking around the source code, I was not super encouraged by the mapped keys, and the real deal killer was caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock lights didn't light up. I was severely disappointed. This is a deal killer for a project intended to become a novelty give for non-technical friends.

  Poking around and I ran into https://github.com/jfedor2/hid-remapper

  I was able to drag the ready-made image onto the feather and it worked as a remapper. Everything passes through reasonably well and not only does caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock work, and the LED light shows activity. This is very promising!

  Also, a huge shout out to Jacek Fedoryński who has some great code in his repo, and great write-ups on his blog. Everything was intuitive and easy to follow.

  Cloned to my github and started poking at the LED activity part of the script. Wasn't too long and I was able to choose an unused GPIO pin to drive a relay. I copied the activity light, tried to run without a time delay on turning back off, but the relay wouldn't trigger my next relay, so I copied his LED time delay structure and shortened the duration to make sure I could get as many clacks as possible. 

  The activity LED fires on keydown and on keyup, so I threw a divider in to only clack on half of the keydown/keyup pairs

  With all of the hard work of creating a board and a hid mapper done, I was able to get a proof of concept up and running in no time at all.

  I think it would be totally great to skip the feather wing (I don't think it helps any) and make a practical effects board or box that can feed directly off the feather.

  In theory output could be midi to a synthesizer, or i2c to a solenoid breakout?

  Practical effects brainstorming

  3v solenoid for normal keystrike events (like in the HAD article a bit back)

  Clunking sound of a roller in detents for line feed

  an actual carriage return for CR?

  Ding after 40 characters without a line feed

  Page down gets detent roller whiz?

  Backspace on typewriters has a double hit I think, or a reverse and a hit? Not sure exactly if this is worth chasing.

  I think I have enough GPIO to do this directly, but having an i2c interface would be lots more interesting. I have been meaning to learn it, though, I'm pretty sure there isn't that much to it. Include the lib and make some calls I would guess.

  Anyway, that's enough success for today...

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