The main reason for posting this is to encourage you to build one for yourself. Before you say "it's too hard", read on.
Sorry if it goes on a bit, but I wanted the non-techies to be able to understand too...
The controller board was scavenged from an old wireless keyboard/mouse combo, on which the mouse stopped working and therefore got dumped.
You can use any old USB wired keyboard (that's a good excuse to change your existing keyboard
) and just have a wire on the desk.
The only really difficult part of this project wasn't really difficult, just repetitive.
What you need to do, is to work out which keys you want to use from the keyboard controller matrix.
I used a small buzzer on a pair of wires for this, but a bulb & battery will do the same job. Some of you may even have an multimeter o7
Before you begin, take a picture of the keyboard, you'll need to refer to the key layout later.
Take the screws out and remove the controller board and membrane. If your controller board has similar plugs & sockets, label them up now.
Mine had two 2-pin connectors, power and antenna and I didn't want to mix them up.
The membrane consists of two halves of plastic sheet, with conducting track between. It will have a row of connections on it, number these on both the board & membrane now, so you know which is pin 1.
Now compare your picture to the membrane and mark out the keys you want to use.
All you need to do now is figure out which two connections on the membrane header are used for which key.
Carefully open the two halves of the membrane and put one of your buzzer probes on one half of the key you want to find the code for.
Using my example, I put one probe on the top half of the "U" key, then slid the other probe over all the header pins until it buzzed.
Now, probe the bottom half of the "U" key and slide the other probe over the rest of the header pins until you find the other connection.
So, pin code 21 and 8 on the header, presses key "U", which is my "deploy weapons" bind in the game.
Build up a table of your keys.
So, now you have a list, count of the pins that are used more than once, so you can plan connections later. I used a daughterboard, so as not to clutter up the controller. You don't strictly need this, but it makes wiring tidier.
Find yourself some momentary pushbuttons, maybe from ebay, and make up a box to house it all.
I found a nice joystick with a momentary flight assist on top which I thought would save space.
My keyboard controller board was originally connected to the membrane using a rubber pressure pad. The membrane contacts the controller board and is held in place by pressure. I had to carefully scrape off the conductive carbon coating, then tin (solder) the copper underneath to solder wires to it later.
Ergonomics can be tricky, trying to figure out what control you want & where it sits under you hand takes time. I originally wanted a console to completely replace the keyboard (apart from chat of course), but ended up making a combat panel.
A footswitch is connected via a socket on the back for voice PTT.
Parts List:-
Keyboard - scrap
USB hub - from junk box (connects a single socket on outside to keyboard & joystick)
Power supplies, plugs & sockets - from junk box.
Round Buttons - ebay, 8x for €11
Triangular Buttons - ebay, 5x for €10
Square Buttons - ebay 10x for €10
Joystick - ebay, €20
Touchscreen - scrap, (dead battery) Android running Roccat Powergrid
Case - scrap
L-Brackets - 20 cents each
Other stuff, post-build I found out:-
my USB hub wasn't powering the Android tablet so I added a small 240V-5V supply.
The backlighting LED's I sourced were 24V, I wanted to run them off a 3V supply and destroyed one in the modification process.
The microphone was picking up some serious noise from the Android WiFi, I cut a length of aluminium tube and slid it over the internal mic cable.
Post your controllers, I want to see how YOU handle ergonomics!
[edit]
As requested, a little more detail on how this thing was put together.
The main casing is made of a blue thermoset plastic material, similar to bakelite. Originally meant for cladding the outside of buildings, its a tough, rigid material, 8mm thick and strong enough to drill & tap with M3 screws (CDROM mounting screws). You could use MDF, wood or even aluminuim for a case.
Cabling was scavenged mainly from old computers, it's not really important what cable you use, although the backlighting does carry a fair bit of power, so I used thicker wire from power supply cables. The daughterboard to button cabling was stripped USB cables and anything else I could find. Spade connectors went on the end of the daughterboard cables to plug onto the switches.
Mains (240VAC) comes in through a EURO (kettle) style socket, through a fuse and then has both lines switched. There's also neon lamp across the input to indicate the presence of mains power.
This powers the button backlighting, which was homebrewed using an adjustable Voltage LM317 circuit, providing about 3V 1A for the LED's.
A few of the LED's in the buttons were rated for 24V, so I removed the internal resistor and swapped the LED for a nice amber coloured one to match the rest.
The daughterboard is a simple printed circuit board breakout connector/splitter. Instead of connecting 4 wires to pin 1 on the keyboard controller board, I jumped a wire from pin 1 to the daughterboard where it breaks into four other connection points, to make soldering easier.
The table on the left (below) is of the keyboard membrane connections, the table on the right is a count up of the pins I used to make the daughterboard.
USB connection to the outside world (the P.C.) is via a single socket on the back of the box (from the front of an old computer case). This runs to a three-port unpowered hub mounted inside.
The hub connects the keyboard controller and T1600M joystick.
I did plan on powering the Android tablet with this, but it took too much power and I had to add another 5V power supply for it.
Something unexpected again here, there was no way to turn the tablet on! I had to solder a wire to the Android power button and fit an external pushbutton to the back of the box.
My Roccat Power-grid is available to download here, if you want something to modify (or simply use).
The buttons are made of several parts, the faces can be removed and legends fitted over the colour filter inside. LCD screens have several different sheets inside them and one of these was cut to feed into a laser printer to print the legends/labels which wer cut out to fit inside the buttons.
The footswitch was made from three bits of offcut of the blue material.
Two of the parts have a square section cut out to house the microswitch and are glued together to give the width for the switch, the third is hinged to provide the top cover.
Some leftover carbon style vynyl was used to cover everything.
Wiring for the footswitch was about 3m of screened microphone cable. This has a very flexible outer sheath and is quite hardwearing.
On the underside I glued some bicycle inner tube which was cut open to provide a non-slip grip, along with two small rubber feet to tilt forwards a bit.
With hindsight, I wish I'd fitted a trackball somewhere in the build. There is a spare USB socket, so it may materialise in the future.
Now I just need to weld up a frame for it all to sit in with some legs of its own, to give me some desktop real-estate back...
Sorry if it goes on a bit, but I wanted the non-techies to be able to understand too...
The controller board was scavenged from an old wireless keyboard/mouse combo, on which the mouse stopped working and therefore got dumped.
You can use any old USB wired keyboard (that's a good excuse to change your existing keyboard
) and just have a wire on the desk.The only really difficult part of this project wasn't really difficult, just repetitive.
What you need to do, is to work out which keys you want to use from the keyboard controller matrix.
I used a small buzzer on a pair of wires for this, but a bulb & battery will do the same job. Some of you may even have an multimeter o7
Before you begin, take a picture of the keyboard, you'll need to refer to the key layout later.
Take the screws out and remove the controller board and membrane. If your controller board has similar plugs & sockets, label them up now.
Mine had two 2-pin connectors, power and antenna and I didn't want to mix them up.
The membrane consists of two halves of plastic sheet, with conducting track between. It will have a row of connections on it, number these on both the board & membrane now, so you know which is pin 1.
Now compare your picture to the membrane and mark out the keys you want to use.
All you need to do now is figure out which two connections on the membrane header are used for which key.
Carefully open the two halves of the membrane and put one of your buzzer probes on one half of the key you want to find the code for.
Using my example, I put one probe on the top half of the "U" key, then slid the other probe over all the header pins until it buzzed.
Now, probe the bottom half of the "U" key and slide the other probe over the rest of the header pins until you find the other connection.
So, pin code 21 and 8 on the header, presses key "U", which is my "deploy weapons" bind in the game.
Build up a table of your keys.
So, now you have a list, count of the pins that are used more than once, so you can plan connections later. I used a daughterboard, so as not to clutter up the controller. You don't strictly need this, but it makes wiring tidier.
Find yourself some momentary pushbuttons, maybe from ebay, and make up a box to house it all.
I found a nice joystick with a momentary flight assist on top which I thought would save space.
My keyboard controller board was originally connected to the membrane using a rubber pressure pad. The membrane contacts the controller board and is held in place by pressure. I had to carefully scrape off the conductive carbon coating, then tin (solder) the copper underneath to solder wires to it later.
Ergonomics can be tricky, trying to figure out what control you want & where it sits under you hand takes time. I originally wanted a console to completely replace the keyboard (apart from chat of course), but ended up making a combat panel.
A footswitch is connected via a socket on the back for voice PTT.
Parts List:-
Keyboard - scrap
USB hub - from junk box (connects a single socket on outside to keyboard & joystick)
Power supplies, plugs & sockets - from junk box.
Round Buttons - ebay, 8x for €11
Triangular Buttons - ebay, 5x for €10
Square Buttons - ebay 10x for €10
Joystick - ebay, €20
Touchscreen - scrap, (dead battery) Android running Roccat Powergrid
Case - scrap
L-Brackets - 20 cents each
Other stuff, post-build I found out:-
my USB hub wasn't powering the Android tablet so I added a small 240V-5V supply.
The backlighting LED's I sourced were 24V, I wanted to run them off a 3V supply and destroyed one in the modification process.
The microphone was picking up some serious noise from the Android WiFi, I cut a length of aluminium tube and slid it over the internal mic cable.
Post your controllers, I want to see how YOU handle ergonomics!
[edit]
As requested, a little more detail on how this thing was put together.
The main casing is made of a blue thermoset plastic material, similar to bakelite. Originally meant for cladding the outside of buildings, its a tough, rigid material, 8mm thick and strong enough to drill & tap with M3 screws (CDROM mounting screws). You could use MDF, wood or even aluminuim for a case.
Cabling was scavenged mainly from old computers, it's not really important what cable you use, although the backlighting does carry a fair bit of power, so I used thicker wire from power supply cables. The daughterboard to button cabling was stripped USB cables and anything else I could find. Spade connectors went on the end of the daughterboard cables to plug onto the switches.
Mains (240VAC) comes in through a EURO (kettle) style socket, through a fuse and then has both lines switched. There's also neon lamp across the input to indicate the presence of mains power.
This powers the button backlighting, which was homebrewed using an adjustable Voltage LM317 circuit, providing about 3V 1A for the LED's.
A few of the LED's in the buttons were rated for 24V, so I removed the internal resistor and swapped the LED for a nice amber coloured one to match the rest.
The daughterboard is a simple printed circuit board breakout connector/splitter. Instead of connecting 4 wires to pin 1 on the keyboard controller board, I jumped a wire from pin 1 to the daughterboard where it breaks into four other connection points, to make soldering easier.
The table on the left (below) is of the keyboard membrane connections, the table on the right is a count up of the pins I used to make the daughterboard.
USB connection to the outside world (the P.C.) is via a single socket on the back of the box (from the front of an old computer case). This runs to a three-port unpowered hub mounted inside.
The hub connects the keyboard controller and T1600M joystick.
I did plan on powering the Android tablet with this, but it took too much power and I had to add another 5V power supply for it.
Something unexpected again here, there was no way to turn the tablet on! I had to solder a wire to the Android power button and fit an external pushbutton to the back of the box.
My Roccat Power-grid is available to download here, if you want something to modify (or simply use).
The buttons are made of several parts, the faces can be removed and legends fitted over the colour filter inside. LCD screens have several different sheets inside them and one of these was cut to feed into a laser printer to print the legends/labels which wer cut out to fit inside the buttons.
The footswitch was made from three bits of offcut of the blue material.
Two of the parts have a square section cut out to house the microswitch and are glued together to give the width for the switch, the third is hinged to provide the top cover.
Some leftover carbon style vynyl was used to cover everything.
Wiring for the footswitch was about 3m of screened microphone cable. This has a very flexible outer sheath and is quite hardwearing.
On the underside I glued some bicycle inner tube which was cut open to provide a non-slip grip, along with two small rubber feet to tilt forwards a bit.
With hindsight, I wish I'd fitted a trackball somewhere in the build. There is a spare USB socket, so it may materialise in the future.
Now I just need to weld up a frame for it all to sit in with some legs of its own, to give me some desktop real-estate back...
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