Fake Keyboard used in Andy Gelme’s “wearable computing” talk

Last night Andy Gelme did a cool talk at Linux Users Victoria where he demonstrated a gesture recognition system that uses a Lilypad Arduino sewn onto a shirt and connected to an accelerometer mounted on a sleeve using conductive thread. Our cunning plan had been to use the output from his system to drive inputs on my Fake Keyboard shield to send keypress events to a host when he moved his arms around so he could control Frozen Bubble physically, but there was a misunderstanding about laptops: I didn’t take mine along, and Andy assumed that I’d have mine there with Frozen Bubble installed so we didn’t quite pull it off. It was cool though bringing the two bits of hardware together in the 5 minutes before the talk, plugging them in, and it worked first time! To make things easier for the talk I added some buttons to the Fake Keyboard shield:

arduino-usb-hid-buttons

Pressing any of the buttons causes it to send a keypress event to the host. I also had female headers soldered on so his Arduino could send events to it, but I took them off before that photo. It’s not as cool as using Andy’s gesture recognition system but just for the fun of it I fired up Frozen Bubble and had a game totally controlled from the Arduino:

arduino-usb-hid-fb

It’s on Amazon and we haven’t finished writing it yet

I was just checking out the new Author Blogs feature on Amazon.com when their system came up with a list of suggested books to associate with my profile – including Practical Arduino! Turns out it’s already been issued an ISBN and a book page has been created for it. Wow, scary.

www.amazon.com/dp/1430224770

Despite the fact that it doesn’t exist yet it’s even been assigned a sales ranking and there are several items listed under “customers who bought this item also bought” and says that 23% of people who view the book page ultimately buy it. Umm, huh? Are people pre-ordering it already? Not that I mind, of course! In fact – please go and pre-order a copy right now! No, order 10!