Planet Arduino

Cheap keyboards never come with extra buttons, and for [Pengu MC] this was simply unacceptable. Rather than go out and buy a nice keyboard, a microcontroller was found in the parts drawer and put to work building this USB multimedia button human interface device that has the added bonus of looking like an old-school Walkman.

The functions that [Pengu MC] wants don’t require their own drivers. All of the buttons on this device are part of the USB standard for keyboards: reverse, forward, play/pause, and volume. This simplifies the software side quite a bit, but [Pengu MC] still wrote his own HID descriptors, tied all of the buttons to the microcontroller, and put it in a custom-printed enclosure.

If you’re looking to build your own similar device, the Arduino Leonardo, Micro, or Due have this functionality built in, since the USB controller is integrated on the chip with everything else. Some of the older Arduinos can be programmed to do the same thing as well! And, with any of these projects, you can emulate any keypress that is available, not just the multimedia buttons.

Cheap keyboards never come with extra buttons, and for [Pengu MC] this was simply unacceptable. Rather than go out and buy a nice keyboard, a microcontroller was found in the parts drawer and put to work building this USB multimedia button human interface device that has the added bonus of looking like an old-school Walkman.

The functions that [Pengu MC] wants don’t require their own drivers. All of the buttons on this device are part of the USB standard for keyboards: reverse, forward, play/pause, and volume. This simplifies the software side quite a bit, but [Pengu MC] still wrote his own HID descriptors, tied all of the buttons to the microcontroller, and put it in a custom-printed enclosure.

If you’re looking to build your own similar device, the Arduino Leonardo, Micro, or Due have this functionality built in, since the USB controller is integrated on the chip with everything else. Some of the older Arduinos can be programmed to do the same thing as well! And, with any of these projects, you can emulate any keypress that is available, not just the multimedia buttons.

JohnLittle writes:

I finally got round playing with my AVRASP v2.0 boards. The ones Sleepwalker3 mentioned. Thanks mate!
I bought three USBASP v2.0 on ebay for under £1.50 each. They each came with a short cable (5×2 sockets at each end). However, they do not come with the JP2 header soldered on. Solder it or you won’t be able to re-flash the on-board ATmega8 chip. JP3 on the other hand has been deprecated. It may still have some use in your own projects. You decide!

Then download some software (this is for Windows): To use the USBASP programmer with the Arduino IDE, you will need to download the driver, latest firmware and WinAVR-20100110-install.

Using a USBASP v2.0 as a cheap ATmega8 Arduino platform - [Link]

Whether you like it or not, every second that passes brings you one step closer to your own demise. It’s not a comforting topic to dwell upon, but it’s reality. This art installation entitled ‘Memento Mori’ is a haunting reminder of just that. Even with all the advanced technology we have today, we still have absolutely no way of knowing just when our time will come.

[Martin] cast a real human skull, then added a 4 digit LED display that’s attached to a rubidium atomic clock (running a FE-5680A frequency standard). The display counts down a single second over and over, measured in millisecond-steps, from 1.000 to 0.001. He built a custom electronic circuit to convert the 10 MHz sine wave into a 1 kHz pulse signal, and used ATmega8 chips running an Arduino sketch to do the rest of the dirty work.

Watching the video after the break, with that smooth mysterious music in the background, one can’t help but ponder our mortality. On a personal note, this totally feels like something you’d find in a video game.

[Thanks Martin]