Planet Arduino

Stream Decks have gained a great deal of popularity within recent years. However, increased demand and a limited supply of them has caused their prices to skyrocket and availability to dwindle, leading many to seek alternatives. The streamer known as CoCoaCoCi has created a DIY Stream Deck before, but this first iteration only had a 3.5” touchscreen that wouldn’t always pick up inputs. So, for his next project, CoCoaCoCi wanted to have some physical buttons along with a display that would only be used to navigate menus and actions.

He started by quickly designing and 3D printing a case to house the Crumble Deck’s electronics, including an Arduino Due as the main processor, a 3.5” TFT LCD screen, and 20 buttons. All the buttons were wired together in a matrix that reduces the number of GPIO pins required to detect them. His code then polls each column and row to check which button is currently being pressed. 

As with the previous model of the Crumble Deck, this version also contains some very handy macros that can be used when streaming. Many of the buttons are dedicated to switching certain audio and video inputs on or off, while others can change which scene is selected. Some buttons can also automatically write and send small messages with the stream’s chat for quick interactions with viewers.

The Crumble Deck is a great and cheap alternative to more expensive off-the-shelf solutions, and you can see more about how it was created below.

The post The Crumble Deck is a Stream Deck alternative based on an Arduino Due appeared first on Arduino Blog.

[Adam Welch] has built macro pads in the past out of pre-fab key matrices and handfuls of Cherry MX clones. But all the stickers and custom keycaps in the world wouldn’t make those macro pads as versatile as a stream deck — those visual shortcut panels with tiny touchscreens for each button that some streamers use to change A/V settings or switch between applications.

Let’s face it, stream decks are expensive. But 0.96″ OLED displays are not, and neither are SMD tactile buttons. Why not imitate a screen deck on the cheap by making it so the screens actuate buttons behind them? [Adam] based this baby on the clever design of [Kilian Gosewisch]’s FreeDeck, and they ended up working together to improve it with a dedicated PCB.

The brains of the operation is an Arduino Pro Micro, which addresses each screen individually via two 74HC4051 mux ICs. Thanks to an SD card module, there’s no need to flash the ‘duino every time you want to change a shortcut or its picture. Even if this deck doesn’t hold up forever, it won’t break the bank to build another one. Poke past the break for the build video, which has all the links you’d need to make your own, including a handy configurator.

There’s more than one way to do a visual macro pad. Here’s one that uses a single screen and splits it Brady Bunch style to match the matrix.

Thanks for the tip, [arturo182]!