I got a friend named Albert. He's been my best friend since middle school. Without going into details, his family has been hit with a bit of a financial situation. We talked about it in private and stuff, and immediately, I tried going through as many money making schemes to fund raise for him. I've never felt more helpless before.
So here's what I decided to do. I'm gonna make him something. Something completely unnecessary, but something that I hope will mean something to him. We're both men of few words, so hopefully this will communicate something I can't say.
We're both really into an MMO called Final Fantasy XIV (14). In MMO's, players usually need a plethora of keybinds for their skills. There's only so many keys a left hand can reach, and so many combinations (ie 4 or shift+4 or ctrl+4 for 3 different keybinds) it can make. So what game peripheral companies have made are ergonomic "keypads" that fit naturally to the left hand, and basically have ~16 keys, fully programmable to be any kind of keystroke(s). These usually run $60 USD which is like $10 billion CDN. So I'm gonna make Albert a small keypad.
The keypad will be a 4x4 grid and made from the Adafruit Trellis; a PCB I've ordered that's specifically meant for this kind of use. It'll be used with an Arduino Uno inside a 3D printed enclosure and act as a 16 key, keypad.
The buttons aren't any sort of mechanical switch; it's membrane. Membrane sucks dick. Buuuuttt it reduces cost and it'll make my initial make of this thing easier. I have all the materials save for the 3D enclosure from which the plans are taken from a "learn" article on Adafruit's website.
The issues I foresee is reprogramming the buttons to whatever Albert's specific keybinds are. I'm planning on getting this done before I next go back home to Canada, so I can be with him and set it up at his house (and also have a full bromo talk with him or some shit). Also, I don't know how the code works yet lol. I've taken a look at the trellis tutorial, but I'm still not sure what is going on.
The first step is getting the 3D parts I guess. In the meantime I'll attempt to work out the code that is supposed to work with the Arduino IDE, but it's been a while since I last coded for "real". I'm also busy trying to figure out all my transfer stuff which is all a pain, but Albert is worth it.
Really hope he doesn't see anything here until I finish this. More to come soon, maybe. Hopefully a week at most.
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