Tipro MID mod for Autocad
Posted: 05 Jan 2019, 22:11
Hello everyone. Long time since i've been here.
I come to you for a little advice. I'm starting to use Autocad at home, and even though it it possible to click my way through the menus, it's much more comfortable to use the keyboard inputs. However I happen to have an Ergodox as my main keyboard, the plit design is not very ergonomic for this task. One solution would be to have an entire layer dedicated to this, but for the moment I decided to dedicate an entire separated keyboard to it .
So I dug up an old Tipro MID 96 keys, which should offer more than enough keys. Mapping the most common keyboard inputs, a whole numpad plus "space", "escape" , "enter" and 4 arrows brings me to about 55 to 60 keys.
Unfortunately Changeme still doesn't support programming over PS/2 on a 64 bit system, and to times where I was running a W7 32bit system are long gone. I wouldn't mind to much setting up a lightweight Linux for this if there is a linux utility out there, somewhere, but the hassle of rebooting everytime I want to change the configuration would be quite annoying.
So I am considering different options:
- Official USB upgrade. I discovered that Tipro offers different controllers. Can someone tell me if they are bacward compatible with the MID series?
- Teensy USB upgrade: Since the matrix board and the controller are separate units, I would assume that they communicate using some kind of serial interface. So my idea would be to replace the Tipro controller with a teensy configured as HID and programmed to read the keyboard inputs on this serial interface and convert them to the keystrokes I programmed. But that means I would need to know what protocol they actually use, and if it's not standard, hope that someone already implemented a library I could use. if someone has any intel on this, let me know
- Custom teensy controller: If none of those are doable, I would strip off the matrix board and keep only the populated plate, and cut it down to size, then handwire it. Actually i already stripped an old 128 matrix and was waiting to put it to good use.
If you have further ideas, or had to solve a similar problem, I would be glad to hear about it.
I come to you for a little advice. I'm starting to use Autocad at home, and even though it it possible to click my way through the menus, it's much more comfortable to use the keyboard inputs. However I happen to have an Ergodox as my main keyboard, the plit design is not very ergonomic for this task. One solution would be to have an entire layer dedicated to this, but for the moment I decided to dedicate an entire separated keyboard to it .
So I dug up an old Tipro MID 96 keys, which should offer more than enough keys. Mapping the most common keyboard inputs, a whole numpad plus "space", "escape" , "enter" and 4 arrows brings me to about 55 to 60 keys.
Unfortunately Changeme still doesn't support programming over PS/2 on a 64 bit system, and to times where I was running a W7 32bit system are long gone. I wouldn't mind to much setting up a lightweight Linux for this if there is a linux utility out there, somewhere, but the hassle of rebooting everytime I want to change the configuration would be quite annoying.
So I am considering different options:
- Official USB upgrade. I discovered that Tipro offers different controllers. Can someone tell me if they are bacward compatible with the MID series?
- Teensy USB upgrade: Since the matrix board and the controller are separate units, I would assume that they communicate using some kind of serial interface. So my idea would be to replace the Tipro controller with a teensy configured as HID and programmed to read the keyboard inputs on this serial interface and convert them to the keystrokes I programmed. But that means I would need to know what protocol they actually use, and if it's not standard, hope that someone already implemented a library I could use. if someone has any intel on this, let me know
- Custom teensy controller: If none of those are doable, I would strip off the matrix board and keep only the populated plate, and cut it down to size, then handwire it. Actually i already stripped an old 128 matrix and was waiting to put it to good use.
If you have further ideas, or had to solve a similar problem, I would be glad to hear about it.