Who knows, maybe I'll come up with a brainstorm.I’m trying to create a certain keyboard macro (using the Record Macro function on the button on the ribbon in Word 2010), a macro that transposes the two typed characters to the right of the cursor. With all the keys poking holes everywhere, not much room is left to mount the USB in and out ports. That little space between the top and second rows could probably just fit all the electronics, but the problem is the connectors. I'd really like to fit everything onto a single board.
This is mostly fine, but it can flex when pressing the keys towards the middle, which would be nice to avoid. Plus, supporting the insides better: right now it's only supported at the extreme front and back edge. I hope to re-design the case, ideally with more rounded corners and tweaking the alignment of a few things.
#MACRO RECORDER KEY PC#
Of course, it's designed to look like it belongs, sitting next to a standard PC keyboard. And if you were curious about the shape and arrangement of keys: It's still not perfect, but it's functional. The only problem was getting the back piece sized correctly, especially with all those holes. A couple pieces slot together at the front, then a screw holds the back on, wedging everything together. But (perhaps aside from the screaming orange color, that's what was easily on hand for this first test run) I'm quite happy with it. The case the boards fit into was a challenge both to design and to produce with my 3D printer. I ended up needing to put it in backwards, trim off a bit of the bulge that now sticks out rather than into the slot it's designed for, and re-wire the connections a bit. I could only find it in a lot of 50 from China, and I was too impatient to wait for it to arrive (and carefully check my design against it) before I ordered the PCBs. And specially designed to fit exactly into these key caps. It's actually three LEDs (red, green, and blue). There's also one LED tucked into the top-left key (bottom left in the left picture above). Thanks to the size of the key caps, there was already some extra room in the case I designed, and cutting a bit of the corner off the smaller board helped squeeze everything in anyway. I ended up mounting the smaller board "upside down" and even though I thought I had the connector perfectly centered, it was off by a tenth of an inch. There are a couple connections between the two of them, and the cross-wise one (top to bottom, at the edge of the smaller board) is off by one space. Then a second smaller one, holding the "smarts". On top one holds the key switches and the diodes which help make the keyboard matrix easy to read and error free. There are two PCBs to hold the electronics. The worst is in the picture on the right, above. I made a handful of small errors along the way, but none were fatal. Normally key presses are passed straight through, but when recording a macro they are stored and then later replayed. It works by sitting between your keyboard and computer. It's an array of extra keys onto which macros can be stored, and then replayed at a touch. The name Remapcro is a portmanteau of remap and macro, because that's what it does. I posted once recently about the prototype of this project, but as of today I've finished the first real one. Remapcro: A Hardware Keyboard Macro Recorder 15:39 - Making