![Image](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/794/992/cf80ab022444e1e1f69e8cd43bdf379c_large.gif)
Intriguing.
Funny you should say that. I thought something similar, being used to long throw "velocity" sensitive MIDI keys. And typewriters! Digital keys seemed a terrible idea for gaming, and yet there they were and here we still are, decades later.Broadmonkey wrote:This was actually what I expected when I first tried a mechanical keyboard (and knew nothing about them) I could not fathom why It was not analog when it felt like it should. The day I can quite easily make my own full keyboard with MX like analog switches is a day to behold!
In that case you would also have to rewrite all the games to know about analogue keyboard keys...Muirium wrote:The hardware isn't the only obstacle. Software is the big one. The USB HID would need rewritten and ultimately the way that operating systems interpret keyboards.
It would have to be rewritten if you want to keep using the plain old keyboard class in USB HID, but has anyone looked in detail at the "game controller" part of the HID standard?Muirium wrote:The hardware isn't the only obstacle. Software is the big one. The USB HID would need rewritten and ultimately the way that operating systems interpret keyboards. Single purpose drivers for Windows games are a hacky way in for this stuff – masquerading as analogue joysticks – but for everyone else?Broadmonkey wrote:This was actually what I expected when I first tried a mechanical keyboard (and knew nothing about them) I could not fathom why It was not analog when it felt like it should. The day I can quite easily make my own full keyboard with MX like analog switches is a day to behold!
I came across this USB HID tutorial which talks about the protocol for a game pad and then they continue by defining a composite device that is both a gamepad as well as a keyboard and a mouse. I have not read through all of it or compared it to other sources. At least the author claims to have used his gamepad to play Battlefield and there is a screenshot from Windows that shows that it acknowledges the composite device.JBert wrote:It would have to be rewritten if you want to keep using the plain old keyboard class in USB HID, but has anyone looked in detail at the "game controller" part of the HID standard?
Sure. This is basically what several types of keyswitches do already, such as capacitive and hall effect switches: they just have some threshold of capacitance / magnetic field / whatever beyond which their controllers consider the switch actuated.Grond wrote:If this works, does it mean you could theroetically build a "switch" based on IR led and sensor? I mean, you could set the activation point to a certain amount of light reflected.