All posts by komar

How to make a keyboard - the matrix

Tutorial parts: 1 matrix | 2 controller (coming soon) | ...

Update (May 2016): check out the Russian translation: Как сделать клавиатуру — Матрица!


This will be the first and hopefully not the last post in the keyboard series. I'm hoping to make this a keyboard building tutorial from the ground up. Today I'll cover digital I/O and keyboard matrices. Equip yourself with some basic knowledge of electronics from school and let's get started.

Continue reading How to make a keyboard - the matrix

GH60 evolution

I'ts been some time since I last wrote about the GH60 project and much more than I had thought has changed since then.

The rev. A prototype was to be just a testing board to make sure everything works all right before we run the actual group-buy, but in fact the number of changes and extra features added since then was so large that the rev. B is actually a new board.

In this post I'll try to quickly present the changes, new features and design decisions that make the (hopefully) final version of this 60% programmable keyboard. Continue reading GH60 evolution

Making my own pendrive (kind of)

This time not about electrical design, electronics or programming!

I had a pendrive which I didn't need at all, and because I found it really ugly I decided to remove all the unnecessary parts to strip it down to the PCB and possibly reduce the size.

The device I'm talking about is a Kingston DT108 8GB flash drive. And here's what I found when I broke it apart:

Kingston DT108partsToshiba chipchip2

Continue reading Making my own pendrive (kind of)

Logged in through ssh?

I've recently come across a problem where I have to check (using bash scripting) whether I am logged in remotely (through ssh, since I only use ssh for that purpose) or locally. This is particularly useful if you have many machines with the same color scheme of bash prompt (and you want to keep it that way), but work on all of them from your local computer.

In this post I'm going to show you how I decided to modify the bash prompt so that I'm sure whether I'm working locally or remotely.

Continue reading Logged in through ssh?