Have to admire the imagination of female programmers, they type in a way you’d never guess!

Forewarning: this is the magic creation of foreign female programmers — Morse USB keyboard



The following is a translation of the article:


For as long as I can remember, I have lived with beautifully designed analog devices such as rotary dial telephones, typewriters and record players. I’ve always wanted to turn these mostly unused things into digital devices, and dad’s old Morse keys seemed like a simple project


Morse code is a way of representing the internationally accepted alphabet (A-Z) and numeric (0-9) letters as a series of dots and dashes. During World War I and World War II, it became a convenient way to send encrypted messages. A traditional Morse key acts as a switch, connecting and disconnecting circuits to propagate the dots and the lengths of the dots over radio waves.



So IT occurred to me that when plugged into the USB 3.0 port of any laptop or PC, the Morse key behaves like a keyboard; Users can type messages in Morse code and corresponding alphanumeric characters appear on the screen. This project I Po on the lot code, you can go to try ~ (https://github.com/nomblr/morse/)


The Morse key collects a lot of dust and is mounted on an ugly plastic base, so I’m going to take everything apart and clean the Morse key!



With the help of wet wipes, the job was done beautifully. I also carefully polished two metal contacts (” switches “) to improve the electrical connections and remove some of the deposited dirt.



The next step is to convert the keys into digital devices. To do this, I use a small, inexpensive microcontroller called Teensy 3.2.









This was my first attempt at this kind of thing, and you can imagine how happy I was when I lit it up and it worked


To make sure Teensy correctly “translates” the Morse password as expected, I wrote some test code for Teensy. So every time I press the Morse key, I see a character output on the computer.

However, I soon ran into a problem: the mechanical switch didn’t make perfect physical contact when pressed (it usually oscillates between “path” and “break” a few times for about 1ms, then stabilizes to “path”). Computers can quickly detect these oscillations, so when I press my Morse key, Teensy detects several quick keys shown in the photo. This effect is called “rebound,” and thankfully the built-in Teensy library compensates for it.

After Teensy was finished programming, I was ready to make a wooden base to hide the electronics underneath the Morse key. Why wood instead of 3D printing? In fact, it is not beautiful, but because the 3D printed base has failed to adapt.



I sawed the boards into 110x90mm so that the Morse keys would fit properly on them. In the bottom I chiseled out a dent about 50x40x10mm for the microcontroller Teensy and wiring.









This may not be the best drilling, but it was the first time I tried it


I drilled two holes in the base for the Teensy wire to the Morse key, and four smaller guide holes at the top for the Morse key to screw into the base.



Finally I polished the new keyboard and connected it to my laptop



Glad to see the finished Morse keyboard on a laptop



* In order for Teensy to successfully detect the difference between each Morse key click, to distinguish between dots, dashes, letters, and words. I combine my keying speed with absolute time. A 150ms threshold was used to distinguish the dash, and the time interval between letters and words was set to 500ms and 3000ms. Of course, everyone’s habits are not the same, this is about to grasp their ~



Here is Igeekbar, welcome every Geek to come to visit ~~~ If you have any suggestions or opinions, please feel free to share with us! Please leave me a message

Ps: It’s really, really scary for a female programmer



via  imgur.com/gallery/lNAtQ