Wireless Chording Keyboard (Q43641)

THE PHOTOS: Are mostly of the OLD design these STLs are meant to pretty-up, but illustrate how to make one without a 3D printer. WHAT IS IT? A Chording Keyboard is a one-handed (usually) input device, where you type keystrokes by pressing combinations of buttons. Kind of like playing Guitar Hero. It's also called a Keyer. All the commercially available designs are bulky, old, and stupid, but the basic idea of a chording keyboard is a great one for wearable computing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyer I've always wanted to produce this design -- poor guy gave up before everyone on the planet had a 3D printer: http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/ MY DESIGN: But my design is nothing of the sort. I put this together a while back, before I had a 3D printer, myself. If you want to go that route, you can... there's no reason to use my STLs, and they're not even complete. So this is basically a very old project I am resurrecting now that I have more resources; but this version is basically the old resource-starved version. It's based around a Nintendo Wii remote. These things are amazing devices for hardware hacking; the wiimote unit itself contains: * Several accessable button/switches * A speaker * 3-Axis Accelerometer * BLUETOOTH * A point-tracking infrared CAMERA. Seriously! * Vibration buzzer * Expansion port... with Arduino/ATmega library!! You can find Wiimotes on sale as low as $15; normally about $30. There is no other way to get this kind of functionality attached to an ATMega/Arduino for twice the price. Probably significantly more. WHAT YOU NEED: This little project doesn't even use an ATMega or Arduino (yet) - all you need is a wiimote, some appropriate buttons, and a way to put/hold it all together. WHAT YOU GET: The only software *I* am providing assumes you are running Linux, and will only work there. But it would be trivial for anyone with knowledge of their operating system to modify for their purposes; the libraries it relies on are available on all platforms. All you need to do is know how to hook into your OS's input queue so you can imitate a keyboard/mouse. WHAT IT CAN DO: * Use the buttons to emulate a keyboard, obviously. * Use the accelerometer to emulate a mouse. * All this over BLUETOOTH! WIP WHY: * Just until I get some STLs that work for this design. I have future designs already under way but they will be separate Thingiverse projects. * I'm not uploading the .scad files until I'm done, since Thingiverse refuses to render STLs anymore in a Thing once I've uploaded something it can't render. ABOUT THE STL: The STL published is a slightly fixed version of the one in the photos, which has too-thin walls and too little space between index finger and thumb buttons. WHERE THE SOFTWARE LIVES: https://github.com/ScribbleJ/WiimoteKeyer