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Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10

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mouser:
Nice little tutorial on how you can make a custom usb keypad with 20 custom keys to do whatever you want for $10.

The trick is to use a generic cheap external usb numpad but then use some clever software that can be told to only respond to certain keys pressed on a certain keyboard.

Neat stuff.


http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-powerful-programmable-keypad-for-less-tha/




from http://lifehacker.com/build-this-diy-programmable-macro-keypad-for-less-than-1757411793

40hz:
Cool little project. Looks like the dev has announced he's halted development on the HIDmacros software that works this magic and has started a new project called LuaMacros which no longer has a nifty setup GUI. More on that here.

Fortunately, he's since open sourced his code for LuaMacros on github so at least it's available for inspection if somebody wants to do a GUI for it.

mwb1100:
Fortunately, he's since open sourced his code for LuaMacros on github so at least it's available for inspection if somebody wants to do a GUI for it.
-40hz (February 14, 2016, 06:33 PM)
--- End quote ---

HidMacros is also open source, but it seems that the tools used to build it may be difficult to wrangle:

HidMacros was written in TurboDelphi which was free variant of Borland Delphi. This free version is not available any more so once I reinstall my computer, there's no way how I can continue with HidMacros. I won't spend any money to buy IDE to develop open source free product-http://www.hidmacros.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=241#p794
--- End quote ---

I don't know anything about the Delphi world, so I have no idea how difficult it might be to port to something else (Lazarus, perhaps?).

wraith808:
I don't know anything about the Delphi world, so I have no idea how difficult it might be to port to something else (Lazarus, perhaps?).
-mwb1100 (February 14, 2016, 07:41 PM)
--- End quote ---

Depends on how he made the GUI.  If he used binary forms, it will be a pain.  But if not, I think that Lazarus will import the form.  I couldn't say for sure however without looking at the code, and I left Delphi behind many moons ago.

Nod5:
Nice!

It is a pity that detection of different keyboards/mice isn't built into Autohotkey. I've only seen workarounds that use HID Macros but whatever HID Macros itself is doing can't be impossible to reproduce. I hope someone does it in a way that we can simply import something in autohotkey and then define keyboard specific hotkeys e.g.

--- ---kb1-Enter::
Anyway those who don't use a numpad for anything else can of course easily replace the numpad button functionality with whatever they want easily with only Autohotkey, see the NumPad section of the keylist here https://autohotkey.com/docs/KeyList.htm

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