Programable Buttons

[gimilthedwarf]

Hey,

I'm building a media center pc with a touch screen but I was wanting to put some buttons on it for volume and next track and other stuff like that. Do you guys know of anything like a usb keypad that is made to do that or something that I could rip apart that would accomplish that?

Thanks for the help guys.

Ben

 

[essi1553]

Search for something called the optimus keyboard, they also sell a 3 button programmable keypad that could do what your asking for.

 

[jpmkm]

ugh. That optimus minikeyboard sounds like total overkill(and yet underkill at the same time, since it sounds like he'll need more than three buttons) for something like this. Is it even in production yet?

You could always just hack up an old keyboard and get the controller guts out of it. Then it would just be a matter of wiring up a matrix for the buttons, then mapping the keycodes to whatever you want your software to do. You could get fancy and use a USB HID chip, but that would be considerably more involved than hacking up a keyboard. Or you could get a USB game controller with plenty of buttons and hack that up.