I'm working on a more or less cheap-ass flight sim input device - but one that could be used for just about anything. The idea came to me when I started playing with a flight simulator - I bought a yoke kit and it was all awesome flyingness until I had to grab the keyboard and press something lame like ctrl-alt-fn5 to lower the flaps or start the engine or something.
I thought - keyboards suck. I bet I can build some switch thing that works better.
My current prototype has modular boards, each with on-off-on switches, rotary pulse switches, etc, but it just looks like a keyboard. (Actually, like a keyboard+8 axes joystick with 32 buttons).
Plug it in. Flick a switch to up. It sends "A". Flick the switch to down. It sends Ctrl-C. Flick a different switch to up. It sends "i bet you never thought i'd type this". Turn a pot - it adjusts one of the joystick axes.
A switch can send anything from a key, to a key+modifiers, or even an arbitrary string to the host.
My questions are - does anyone else think this is a good idea? Want one?
And how would you change the key mappings? If it requires distributing source, that's easy (for me) but not so friendly for anyone else. I could have the source hosted, use a web interface to get the settings, modify the source and build it and give the user the compiled code to load with the teensyloader. Can you think of any other way?
I thought - keyboards suck. I bet I can build some switch thing that works better.
My current prototype has modular boards, each with on-off-on switches, rotary pulse switches, etc, but it just looks like a keyboard. (Actually, like a keyboard+8 axes joystick with 32 buttons).
Plug it in. Flick a switch to up. It sends "A". Flick the switch to down. It sends Ctrl-C. Flick a different switch to up. It sends "i bet you never thought i'd type this". Turn a pot - it adjusts one of the joystick axes.
A switch can send anything from a key, to a key+modifiers, or even an arbitrary string to the host.
My questions are - does anyone else think this is a good idea? Want one?
And how would you change the key mappings? If it requires distributing source, that's easy (for me) but not so friendly for anyone else. I could have the source hosted, use a web interface to get the settings, modify the source and build it and give the user the compiled code to load with the teensyloader. Can you think of any other way?