Cheap COTS button/keypad solution for FRC

Technical Programming
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Just thought I’d share my solution for a cheap operator keypad for FRC, an Adafruit RP2040 Macropad.

I’ve written some code that allows the keypad to present itself as a standard gamepad, so that it can be used with minimal effort in your robot code.
This is better than using keymapping software, as this solution does not require any software to be running on the host machine (driver station) at all to function. Just plug and play.

This macropad allows for you to display the function of each key on its OLED display, as well as colour code each key using the RGB LED backlighting.

Should prove useful to someone out there.

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This is great! We used some key mapping stuff in recent years for a random keypad and it was always such a pain. Thanks for sharing!

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adafruit’s circuitpy stuff is freaking awesome. im surprised it took until now for someone to make use of it

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We did similar in 2023, with a Pico-based keypad kit.

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oh nice! was this with circuitpy too, or with tinyusb? i worked with tinyusb for a school project last year, and man that thing was cool. you can turn an rp2040 board into a usb anything

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It was with circuitpy.

We used this kit (switches and key caps are sold separately fyi) https://www.boltind.com/product/pico-14-numerical-keypad-macro-pad-pcbs-and-hardware-kit/

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Robot-2023/operatorKeypad at 0d3e30215dadf7a1c731a8fec33aa3cd80ebac65 · frc6995/Robot-2023 · GitHub This custom code manifests it as a 14-button USB game controller, without any need for driver-station-side software.

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I bought this for us to play around with, but we haven’t yet (so, might be great, might be crap): Amazon.com
Screen Shot 2024-11-11 at 10.44.33 AM

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