February 2009
Beginner
128 pages
2h 45m
English
Content preview from Getting Started with Arduino
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Keyboard Hacks
Computer keyboards are still the main way to interact with a computer after more than 60 years. Alex Pentland, academic head of the MIT Media Laboratory, once remarked: "Excuse the expression, but men's urinals are smarter than computers. Computers are isolated from what's around them."[1]
As tinkerers, we can implement new ways to interact with software by replacing the keys with devices that are able to sense the environment. Taking apart a computer keyboard reveals a very simple (and cheap) device. The heart of it is a small board. It's normally a smelly green or brown circuit with two sets of contacts going to two plastic layers that hold the connections between the different keys. If you remove the circuit and use a wire to bridge two contacts, you'll see a letter appear on the computer screen. If you go out and buy a motion-sensing detector and connect this to your keyboard, you'll see a key being pressed every time somebody walks in front of the computer. Map this to your favourite software, and you have made your computer as smart as a urinal. Learning about keyboard hacking is a key building block of prototyping and Physical Computing.
[1] Quoted in Sara Reese Hedberg, "MIT Media Lab's quest for perceptive computers," Intelligent Systems and Their Applications, IEEE, Jul/Aug 1998.
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