ASCIIboard

Inspiration

My teammate and I were both inspired by our computer engineering classes. The most arbitrary thing you have to remember is the ASCII codes, and there's not much of a use of them outside of efficient algorithms. We were also inspired by Braille input methods when designing this: they're actually pretty similar.

What it does

It's a 5-button keyboard. Input is performed using the right 4 buttons, and correspond directly to the bits of the encoded character. To switch nibbles or type characters, you use the latch button. You must latch twice to output a single character, as a character requires 8 bits.

How we built it

We used an Arduino Leonardo as our primary input module, as it can emulate keyboard and mouse inputs. Ideally we'd use an Arduino Micro, but unfortunately those weren't available at the hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

Because we started fairly late (Saturday morning), the hardware lab had apparently run out of both push-buttons and photoresistors. Luckily, we managed to salvage 5 usable buttons from a CD player found in the e-waste bin.

The input board was soldered, due to the impracticality of using the recovered buttons in a breadboard. This turned to be both our biggest nightmare: we spent the better part of the afternoon figuring out why it wouldn't work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Both of us mainly came to the hackathon this weekend to build something we would enjoy building. This project is definitely one of them. This is the first time we've worked on a hardware project collaboratively, and we both think it turned out well.

What we learned

I'm going to cut to the chase:

1. Always, always solder with flux. It's going to be less of a pain debugging later.
2. You will never get enough sleep at a hackathon. It's a small price to pay for finishing your project.
3. Plan things out before you break out the soldering iron.

What's next for ASCIIboard

For a 2nd prototype, we'd like to have two input modules, one for each hand, and thus for each nibble of the byte. The prototype buttons we used in this design could be replaced with anything: we would like to experiment with using a haptic glove to allow the user to air-type their ASCII characters.

Built With

• arduino
• c++