Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part II: Advanced Hacks, Tools, and Techniques

The keyboard shown in Figure 14-16 is made by http://www.flexis.co.kr/

products/epd.htm and can be purchased in the U.S. at http://www.man-

machine.com/fx100.htm.

Finger mouse

A number of companies now offer a “finger” mouse. This mouse, shown in

Figure 14-17, is a small trackball housed in a hand-size package. If you do a

search for “finger mouse”, you should be able to locate a number of vendors

selling them. Since this device is portable and does not require any surface

upon which to operate, it makes a good choice for a wearable project.

Speech recognition

If you want your system to be truly hands-free, you may want to consider

using speech recognition.

The Windows XP operating system includes speech recognition as part of

the base package. There are also third-party packages that perform this

function. Several companies also produce speech recognition for use with

other operating systems. Here are a few of the more popular packages:

Dragon Speech (http://www.scansoft.com/)

IBM Via Voice (http://www.ibm.com)

Voiceware (http://www.voiceware.co.kr/english/index.html)

These systems usually require a clean voice signal to work well. This means

that you will need a boom microphone (with wind screen) mounted in front

of your mouth. You can also experiment with other microphone placement

schemes.

Voice output

If you ...