I’ve been building a light-up keypad for home automation devices (and Zoom sessions). Last time, I gave an overview of the project. This entry will detail the hardware itself, completing a basic remote-only setup, while the next post adds more advanced features and connects it to a server. You can browse the entire series from the link in the header, or by clicking here.
Hardware
I spent some time trying to find just the right hardware for this toy. I looked at USB keyboards, custom keyboards from the performance driving world, video editing keyboards, and even some fancy systems with little color LCD displays on each key. I ended up picking the 4x4 NeoTrellis Kit from Adafruit.
I use Zoom. A lot. Obviously, a whole lot more since we all started working from home. It’s not a big deal – I’ve gotten pretty used to it, and it’s a good system. So much better than the PictureTel VTCs I occasionally used in the early 90’s.
What’s annoying, though, is when someone asks a question and I’m on mute. Suddenly, there’s a scramble to figure out which monitor the mouse pointer is on…jiggle…jiggle…JIGGLE! Oh, there it is. Now, where’s the window? Over – no, wrong way. Over here. Hover. Up comes the control bar. Down to the left and click – shoot, missed. Hover again. Okay, NOW mute is off.
My first infosec con was the first ShmooCon, in 2005. Then I went to Black Hat and DEFCON. Then ShmooCon again. Then Vegas again. And before long, I had a whole lot of badges cluttering up drawers.
Probably a code violation. (Circuit breakers are behind these doors).
In 2010 I won, as part of the ShmooCon crypto contest, a stuffed moose head for the wall (“But not a real moose head, that’s cruel 🎶”). So I started hanging the badges from that, and it followed me from office to office for a while. By the time I moved into a home office, I had far too many badges to hang from the moose and so I moved them to nails on top of my circuit breaker doors. Which is probably a violation of several building and safety codes. So back in May of 2014, I decided to correct the situation.
A few years back, I moved from a fairly generic Wordpress-based blog to a statically-generated system based on secondcrack. It was a fairly simple system, that I immediately hacked up to add different post types, lists, and other taxonomy-like things. And I pretty much stole the look and feel of the primary site secondcrack was built for.
It worked out pretty well, overall, but I did notice at times that it was a little too bare-bones. Especially difficult was navigating past a really long post at the top of the page, to get to something shorter and totally different buried beneath it.
A few months ago, I set up my computer on a counter-level table in the home theater for a few days, to see what I thought of the idea of a standing desk. I liked it, but definitely didn’t want to be standing all the time. I needed something adjustable.
Then a couple months later, The Wirecutter posted a review of standing desks, and their top pick was the Fully Jarvis Bamboo desk. Unfortunately, that was a little too small for the large collection (2 monitors plus the laptop screen, plus various other stuff) I had on my IKEA Gallant corner desk. However, they sell an L-shaped version, the Jarvis J3. And it’s available as just the frame, so I can even keep my desktop.
Stuff about Programming, woodworking projects, hardware hacking...
Apr 26, 2021 - 2200 Words -
