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SAMD21 with Makernet - Keypads!

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jeremy-gilbertJeremy Gilbert 06/02/2017 at 20:260 Comments

Lots of great stuff going on this weekend, and I'm still cruising off of the huge dose of encouragement I received in the last week!

First of all, a bunch of new boards came back from OSH Park. The first is a breakout of everything on the ATSAMD21 plus some Makernet headers. This is by far the smallest ATSAMD21 board I have and I'm a bit proud of how compact it is. It reminds me a lot of the Teensy 3.0 boards.

I plan to use this board to prototype keypad interfaces. The idea is to make an adapter board you can connect to any keypad and get it onto Makernet easily. Keypads are annoying to wire into a project because they need a lot of GPIO pins and thus a lot of messy wires in your project.

I have a bunch of keypads in my collection:


While most of these keyboards are polite, only needing ~8 pins, some others are not so elegant and have a pin per key.

And then there are some boards like this one I ripped out of a graphics test pattern generator I bought at MIT swapfest:

This board, while very cool, needs 20 pins for reasons I haven't fully investigated.

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