hmmmmmmmmmmm......but if the switches are in series, won't they all do the same thing??
The switches aren't in series, they'd be hooked up to the microcontroller chip in the same way the keys on the keyboard would be,
but they'd be able to hook into eachother.
and if it's an analog signal, would there be an impedance change issue running them in parallell?
One side of the chip is digital (the part that goes into the computer), the other is analog. We don't really have to worry about impedance since these are switches and not, say resistors, or LED's, etc,... we aren't doing anything, we're just switching a logical state.
here a parallel example with just one 'key' :
input
| |
| |
| *_______________
*__|_______________SWITCH
| |
| |
| |
KEYBOARD
Either the two wires short when you push the switch -or- the two wires short when you push a key on the keyboard,
for the input, there is no difference. Maybe i'll look up the details on how they hook up to the microcontroller and make a little schematic and put it up on the bpm notepad website once i have it finished. Though chances are that many keyboards use different types of microcontroller, so it may be different and you may have to 'follow' the lines on the keyboard pcb (or membrane) anyway.
-Gothi[c]
ahah!! gotcha!!! forgot i'm not dealing with an analog signal again.
)
so what i'm thinking is then that i need to basically jsut have a wire to the chip from the appropriate switch...as slong as it's a trace to the proper pin, etc, that makes sense.
i'm thinking maybe the way to do it is to sacrifice two keyboards, and ultimately make one with a couple switching jacks...just plug in the foot pedal to the keyboard when necessary!
anyways, this is cool...thanks!
that said, my buddy Moonie wanted to chime in, and asked me to share the following.....he thinks it should be flash based, cuz then it will be cross platform compatible.
he may have an idea! but i need to use the formatting to ensure the proper chords appear in the right places over the lyrics, i dunno if that'd work with flash.....and i don;t like flash stuff, it often spies on you.
i like THIS one, tho....the BPM Notepad works perfect for me!
here's Moonie:
So, about that widget DonationCoder's makin'....
I was about to join that site, but really the only thing I wanted to
do was share a few ideas, so feel free to pass these on to that
discussion thread.
First, I wanted to suggest an alternative to hacking a PC keyboard,
mainly because I don't think many computers are set up to handle 2
keyboards at once ... so that might be a prob.
Hacking a mouse, on the other hand, is more likely, because PCs and
Macs do seem to be more prepared for the idea that there are 2
computer mouse devices hooked up to it.
Speaking of Macs, if you and DC made this in Adobe Flash, it would be
cross-platform for Mac, Windows and even Linux users [as long as you
use an old enough Flash version as the Publish setting when you
export the final Flash versions]. That way Linux or Unix users would
not have to compile source code, I think ... but DC knows more about
coding than I probably ever will, so I offer that suggestion with
sincere humility.
Your TelePrompTer project did inspire me to put that on my "to do"
list, but my needs are different. I would like a simple TelePrompTer
that loaded a plain text file, let me control the scroll speed, and
had a few controls that should be available all the time, while it's
running:
- toggle scroll direction
- increase speed
- decrease speed
- reverse [as in, mirror-image] the screen
Those are needed, I feel, for actual TelePrompTer use, where a person
is looking at the camera and trying to read from the prompter at the
same time. My office has a TelePrompTer, but it's a pretty cheap,
shabby one, it only works in Windows, and it's old enough that we are
never sure it will work again each time there's an upgrade to Windows.
I'd also like to have a control that changes the font size, but I'm
not sure I can manage that in Flash -- I wouldn't want it to be
adjustable while it's scrolling, anyway. If I can't make font size
adjustable, I must at least make it very large, and be sure it
hyphenates long words.
If I can swing it, I'll make a Flash program that loads an external
text file, but I wouldn't be loading XML, HTML or images of any kind.
--moonie
PS: did ya know that "TelePrompTer" was a trademark? Just found that
in the spell check dictionary. Apparently they like the weird capital
letters, just like that. I guess if I make one, I can't call it a
teleprompter.
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