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Author Topic: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10  (Read 13407 times)

mouser

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Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« on: February 14, 2016, 10:59 AM »
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.



from http://lifehacker.co...less-than-1757411793

40hz

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Re: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2016, 06:33 PM »
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

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Re: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2016, 07:41 PM »
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.

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

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

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Re: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« Reply #3 on: February 14, 2016, 08:27 PM »
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?).

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

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Re: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« Reply #4 on: February 17, 2016, 10:47 AM »
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

Edvard

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Re: Make a custom 20 key keypad for $10
« Reply #5 on: February 22, 2016, 08:40 PM »
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.

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

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?).

The dev is a little short-sighted if he had never heard of Lazarus, and never considered Delphi Personal Edition which can still be found all over the web.  Speaking of Lazarus, I'll give it a shot.  Stay tuned.

EDIT: Well, that was quick.  Apparently, the author already has Lazarus code in the Git repo.  Looks like it was simply a quick-and-dirty way to get a 64-bit build of the X-Plane plugin out before he switched to Lua.  Digging through the code now, looks like there's a lot of dependency on Windows-specific stuff (Winhook.dll), as well as the X-Plane SDK, which it looks like he made the thing for in the first place.

https://github.com/me2d13/hidmacros
As Xplane 10 is mainfly 64b application and TurboDelphi is not free with 64b compiler the Xplane plugin was also compiled in Lazarus using free pascal compiler. It has separate folder with sources however it's copy of whole application with only few changes for compilation. The code structure and organization is not perfect now so some cleanup and documentation is one of first tasks to be done. However it works and those are real sources used for last build. The application has several dependencies (DirectX API, SimConnect SDK, X-plane SDK) - those are not included but should be public available. However if anyone has difficulties to compile this application, please contact author at [email protected].
« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 09:14 PM by Edvard »