Westy92.com If you're bored enough, go ahead and read this. :)

• Home
• About
• Downloads

Emulating a Keystroke using a Staples Easy Button

A friend and client of mine owns a DJ business. He has photo booths that he brings to events as part of a Wedding or DJ package.

The booths are home made. I believe that he uses the program Photobooth on a Mac to take the pictures, and needed an easy way for people to step into the booth and press one button to take a picture. For this reason, I needed to make a Staples® Easy Button™ emulate the spacebar character.

For this to be accomplished, I needed:

• a Staples® Easy Button™
• a programmable microcontroller; I used a Teensy because it is cheap ($16) and gets the job done.
• a USB cable
• wire
• a soldering iron
• a small Phillips Screwdriver
• a drill and/or knife
• patience

I cannot take credit for most of this project. My primary source was MAKEzine. Before starting this project, I watched that video twice, taking notes the second time.

The first thing that I did was take apart the Easy Button™ and remove everything that I didn't need. This included the metal bracket, the speaker, and all of the wires. Next I cut two holes. One from the battery compartment to where the speaker was, and also a slot in the battery compartment so the Teensy fits.



Next I soldered short wires, about 3" in length, from the button to the Teensy. I used ground ("GND") and "B2" as my pins on the Teensy.



Next I programmed the Teensy using this source code:

After programming the Teensy, it is time to test it. Your computer should recognize it as a plug-and-play USB Keyboard, and every time you press the button, it should print a space in a text editor, like you were using your Keyboard's spacebar.

If it all works fine, place the Teensy into the Easy Button™ like this:



and re-assemble the Easy Button™ until you get this far:



Try it again, and if it still works, finish assembling it.

The finished product looks like this:



and functions like this:

Congratualtions, you have now built an Easy Button™ that emulates whatever keystroke you want it to!

Cheers!

</Westy92>

Tagged as: booth, button, easy, Easy Button, Emulate, Hack, keyboard, Keystroke, Photo, photo booth, photobooth, solder, USB Leave a comment

Community