Most exciting project log yet!

Bran McEvoy was generous enough to gift me a plastic switch assembly that is orders of magnitude more ergonomic and usable than anything I have ever made or encountered.

This is a picture of the entire system.

Circuit enclosure

The enclosure was a standard sized Altoids mint tin I had on hand.

I covered the bottom and edges in blue vinyl electrical tape to avoid shorting out the circuit.

I then filed out a place for the usb cable.

Finally I poked 14 holes near where each of my ground and positive leads would exit the enclosure.

Connected Leads

The positive and ground leads were attached to compatible spade connectors and attached to the switches. (this was made much easier by following Brian's good advice of labeling EVERYTHING.)

Update on the current status of the project.

I have fully dissassembled the spifchorder and I am in a brainstorming stage to get a really solid desktop chorder idea in my head.

Some really great ideas were generated after a brainstorming session with Brian who is working on some really amazing chording projects right now.

TODO

• Decide on a stable desktop enclosure
• Find ideal placement of new microswitches
• assemble and test

New enclosure made from a project box.

This is the bottom of the device with the cover off.

The three thumb switches are visible (the white one is equivalent to a "home row key" and is textured).

This is where the index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers rest.

The coiled cable pictured here is a makeshift USB cable I put together so I could make the keyer more modular.

I managed to get the IC programmed and threw together a test rig for learning how to chord. I am glad to say that it is functioning. However there are still a few different things to improve upon/work out. The chorder seems to shut off after some amount of time it happens both while using it and when it is at rest (no keypresses).

The next things I will be working on is getting it to stay operationally constant and improving on the ergonomics of it's use.

It may be a little messy but it is at least semi-functional.

This is my fist log for this project, and my first log ever. I will start with saying before I assemble the circuit I am attempting to program the ATmega168P using a buspirate. Which for someone without any experience with AVR programming is proving rather difficult. I will update this project after a successful flash of the Spiffchorder software.