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USB keyboard feature so very nearly done

A project log for Repurposing an Accom Axial Control Panel

Turning an obsolete video editor console into a mothership-sized keyboard + trackball + stream deck

noughtnautnoughtnaut 11/11/2022 at 14:590 Comments

# Keyboard

You know when you're 🤏 thiiis close to completing a feature, and then you hit that "one tiny snag"? Yeah, that.

I have all the keys mapped out and can accurately report key press/release events. However, I have 189 keys which is quite a bit more than a "standard USB keyboard", so my plan was to report the "standard" keys using a built-in library (including mapping [REV] and [FWD] to [CTRL] and [ALT], etc.), and have the remainder of the keys send text macros until I write a host-side serial driver to interpret them (for instance, [FILE MNGR] could map to [WIN]+E, but I don't want to be that specific at the firmware level).

Anyone who's tinkered with microcontrollers knows that the Arduino IDE has, uh, lots of potential. That is to say, it works but phooey is it cumbersome as an editor. So I'm doing my coding in IntelliJ (using the CLI version of the compiler and using the Teensy loader to connect to the hardware, and also still running the Arduino IDE solely for its simple serial monitor.

Alas! Going off piste frequently means hitting bumps, and one such is that the standard Arduino headers are not implicitly available. So I can have `#include <Keyboard.h>` and have everything building just fine up until the moment I try to call `Keyboard.press(keycode)`. And yes, I have of course set the device mode in the Arduino IDE as per instructions, but those instructions don't take nonconformity into account. I imagine I can simply `#include "path/to/Keyboard.h"`, but I haven't found that path yet.

# Open source

Not that there was ever any doubt, I just hadn't gotten around to it yet -- this project is naturally going to be open source. Insofar as it makes sense given that the intended hardware for it is both rare and expensive. As of this writing, the code resides at GitHub and is under a 3-clause BSD license.

To be continued...

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