I had to renovate a bathroom in my house this month, so progress on this has slowed, but I am still excited about this workflow-based approach to human machine interaction.

Lately I have been collecting info about how to monitor simultaneous key presses in various languages. Any introductory programming book will show how to get a single key press/key release at a time, but it can be tricky to get more than one.

In Javascript, the best scheme seems to use Event Listeners: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_element_addeventlistener.asp. Java has a similar concept with KeyListeners (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2623995/swings-keylistener-and-multiple-keys-pressed-at-the-same-time and https://community.oracle.com/thread/2133158?start=0&tstart=0).

One of those pages reminded me that many inexpensive keyboards only support one or two key presses at a time, and some high-end keyboards have various regions where only one or a few key presses can be registered at a time. Microsoft has a good article about this “Ghosting” effect: https://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/antighostingexplained.mspx. That makes me think that the best alternative is still to produce my own custom keyboard, since even the best software won’t overcome that hardware limitation.

I think it is time to pickup a Teensy (http://store.hackaday.com/products/teensy-3-2) and write some microcontroller code.

Have a great day!

-Dan