On paper, the ByoWave Proteus controller sounds like a perfect setup for a failed Kickstarter. A small team makes an attempt at a very ambitious first product, fails to deliver at all or delivers some severely cut down version of it after years of delay. Except in this case there was no Kickstarter and they didn't fail. This post is a random collection of thoughts and facts about the controller,…
Here's some stuff I did last year. Pixelrings : LED earrings programmable in Python. RP2040-RS232 : RS-232 adapter with an RP2040 chip. Can be used to adapt ancient serial mice or 3D mice for modern systems or as a generic serial-to-USB adapter. Some new Flatbox revisions: rev4.1: an updated RP2040 variant with a USB host port rev4.1wasd: same but with a WASD layout rev8: an RP2350 variant with a…
I used to post on this blog whenever I finished a project, but these days I typically just put it on GitHub and call it a day. I think some of these projects deserve separate posts, but just in case I never get around to it, here's what I've been doing for the last three years or so. HID Remapper : programmable adapter for USB input devices. Remap buttons, make keyboards work as game controllers,…
Microsoft's Surface line of hardware has some nice computers and accessories. Among the accessories there's the Surface Dial - a Bluetooth knob that can do things like volume control, scrolling, undo/redo and some other functions in certain applications, mostly artist-oriented. For some reason the physical form of the Surface Dial appeals to me, but since its price is not exactly in the impulse…
I always thought that when you connect two mice to a computer, there should be two mouse cursors, one for each mouse. Unfortunately that's not really how it works on modern operating systems, at least not by default. Software add-ons exist that draw a second cursor for the second mouse (and also perform some tricks to make button clicks work as expected). I'm sure they work fine, but I came up…
One of the problems when making a custom fightstick (arcade controller for fighting games) is modern console compatibility. While it was easy to make an Arduino or similar board work as a USB controller for the PS3, unfortunately it is no longer the case with the PS4 and PS5. Only licensed controllers work with them due to restrictions introduced by Sony. Every licensed controller has a private…
Having previously made some 3D printed fightsticks (arcade controllers for fighting games) that were just plastic boxes with holes for arcade buttons or mechanical keyboard switches, I started thinking, could I make one that's even thinner? On my previous designs I just soldered wires to the keyboard switches, but they're really intended to be soldered onto a printed circuit board. Using a PCB…
Fighting games like Virtua Fighter, Tekken or Street Fighter originated at the arcades and have traditionally been played on cabinets with heavy duty joysticks and buttons. Even though they're mostly played on consoles and PCs these days, many players use arcade sticks modeled after the arcade cabinets, either because they consider them superior to controllers or simply because they enjoy their…
I made a Bluetooth trackball in which all the electronics are inside the ball. The ball is the entire trackball. Here it is in action: Inside the ball there's a microcontroller and a set of sensors that together with some clever algorithms allow the microcontroller to know the ball's absolute orientation in 3D. When the ball is rotated, it sends the appropriate commands to the computer over…
I made an ergonomic split keyboard using the Dactyl Manuform design, specifically the 5x6 version. I'm going to describe the process in the hope that it will be useful to someone considering making one. Here's what the final product looks like: The Dactyl Manuform , made by Tom Short, is a modification of the original Dactyl keyboard design by Matthew Adereth. Matthew has given an entertaining…
You know those days when lifting a finger to scroll a website seems like to much of an effort? No, of course not, me neither. But just in case I made this so I can scroll just by leaning back in my chair: If you look closely there's Adafruit's Feather nRF52840 Sense board attached to the back of the chair. It uses the onboard sensors to figure out the angle of the chair's back and if it's over a…
I've been playing around with orientation sensors and Bluetooth HID recently. Today I'd like to show you what is perhaps my most practical application of those yet. I made a head mouse, also known as an air mouse, or in my case, a hat mouse: The device is attached to a hat and you move your head around to move the mouse cursor on the screen. It uses the standard Bluetooth mouse protocol so it…
I have recently discovered that the HID mouse protocol supports absolute cursor positioning in addition to the more common relative mode. I think that opens interesting possibilities, one of them being we can plot real-time charts in MS Paint with no additional software running on the computer, using just the standard Bluetooth mouse protocol: The board used above is Adafruit's Feather nRF52840…
Perhaps you're familiar with a type of device commonly referred to as a USB rubber ducky . It's a seemingly innocent device that looks like a regular USB drive, but when connected to a computer, it acts as a USB keyboard and sends malicious keystrokes to the victim's machine, as if a human typed them (but faster). The commands sent can download some unwanted software or open a reverse shell and do…
Remember Logitech's April Fools' video from 2017? The one where the gym ball works as a trackball? I made that for real: I did this as kind of a detour while working on the next version of my Bluetooth trackball from last year (stay tuned for that). I found a board on AliExpress that has the nRF52832 Bluetooth chip from Nordic, an MPU-9250 9DOF sensor, a built-in battery charging circuit and comes…
Don't you hate it when you get up from your desk at work to go to the bathroom, only to find out that all the stalls are occupied? I did, so I made a website that shows the current status of each stall. It normally looks something like this: To make this possible, I installed a 433 MHz door/window sensor on each stall door. Somewhere nearby I put an ESP8266 module with a 433 MHz receiver board.…
I have recently started making traditional prints of my analog photos and it is a lot of fun in itself, but naturally I am also treating it as an excuse to play with some electronics. I have previously described a simple timer I made for measuring how much time each print spends in the developer and fixer trays. Today I'd like to present my solution for the more important type of darkroom timer:…
Two kinds of timers are used in a darkroom when making prints. One for controlling the exposure time on the enlarger and one for measuring the time the print spends in the developer, stop bath and fixer trays. Arguably the second kind is not as critical as the first, as any clock that displays seconds can be used for that purpose. Nevertheless I've made such a timer and I'm using it regularly when…
Update (2021-01-27): I have made an improved version of this project, see here for details . For a while now I've been fascinated with the idea of making a trackball-type input device in which the ball itself would be the entire device. Unlike a regular trackball, where the ball is just a ball and registering its motion and communicating with the computer is done by external sensors and chips,…
There are many apps and websites for tracking time spent on projects and I'm sure they work well. But I like physical objects so I made a gadget - a cube that you can flip to a different face to indicate that you're now working on some project or task. Each face corresponds to a different project and one of the faces means you don't want to track time anymore. The idea is of course not original,…
Update (2018-04-21): IKEA has rolled out official support for Google Assistant, so if you just want your lights to work with Google Home, you don't need any of this. If you're interested in the technical side, you may still find this post useful. Earlier this year I got some IKEA smart lights from their TRÅDFRI line. They can be controlled by a remote and also through a smartphone app, if you have…
Among other interesting things, Android 4.3 introduced a proper way of accessing notifications from an app. I used this API to make an external notification light for my phone: It uses Adafruit's Trinket , a Bluetooth serial board from dx.com to talk to the phone and it's powered via USB. Here's a diagram of the connections: The Arduino sketch that's running on the Trinket is very simple, it…
My previous attempt at a Morse code keyboard worked over USB and used a copper coin as a capacitive sensor. Since then I've acquired a real telegraph key and Adafruit's Bluefruit EZ-Key board. With that and a Trinket I made a Morse code Bluetooth keyboard. It works with any computer that has Bluetooth (also phones and tablets). Here's what it looks like in action (as usual please excuse my lack of…
I never had a Nintendo Wii, but I got a nunchuck controller to play with. It has a joystick, two buttons, an accelerometer for orientation sensing and the third-party ones are dirt cheap. It turns out that it's really easy to talk to them from an Arduino too, because they speak I2C and as you would expect the protocol is well documented on the Internet. I used Adafruit's Trinket , Bluefruit EZ-Key…
Some time ago I made an emergency mute button that connected over USB. Now with Adafruit's Bluefruit EZ-Key I made a wireless version that works over Bluetooth. Look, no wires: In addition to the Bluefruit board, I used a Trinket and a 100 mAh lipo battery . It all fit nicely inside the button: Here's a diagram of the connections: There's no on/off switch and to charge the battery I have to…