I’ve been looking into this for quite some time, and I can only seem to find one way to implement a keyboard. Using a Teensy USB dev board and keyboard with USB-to-PS/2 converter, as described here. Does anyone happen to know another way to do this? I’ve almost figured out how to do this same thing with a PS/2 mouse, and the keyboard is my next project. Thanks!
I think you can read the keyboard in the dashboard program and send information to the robot using smartDashboards. If done in LV, use the Connectivity>>Input Device palette.
Greg McKaskle
Can you be a little more specific about what you mean? There’s already a keyboard on most computers, and the few tablet computers without one usually have a USB input for an external keyboard.
Are you trying to control an FRC robot using keyboard commands? You can get keyboard input in a custom Dashboard program and pass it along to the robot using either the SmartDashboard support or a custom communication scheme.
Sorry for the confusion. I meant a competition legal plug and play USB device that we could use for controlling an entire FRC robot, including things such as the space bar, so using the driver-station keyboard is not what I had in mind.
I’m afraid I’m more confused than before.
What do you mean by “competition legal”, and how does what you want to do differ from using the computer’s built-in keyboard?
… I researched this topic here before I decided to ask this question, and some people said hat there were legality issues with modifying the driver station (I guess anyone could have said that…). I also wanted to stay away from the main keyboard in case the driver accidentally hits the space bar or something and e-stops the robot. I would like to use a keyboard more like a joystick, where the button presses can be registered, but are meaningless unless the program says so (basically the keyboard doesn’t type. It’s just a bunch of buttons waiting to be told what to correspond to). In addition, I figured it might be easier to program.
You can’t modify the Driver Station program, but you can still read the keyboard in a Dashboard program and send commands to the robot that way.
Any keyboard you use will still have a space bar, unless you physically modify it to break that key. Or unless you put a filtering device between it and the computer, which I suppose is what you were trying to get at with the Teensy?
Maybe you want to connect a USB keypad? No spacebar, just a grid of keys that return numbers and a few symbols. Read it from the dashboard, process it or send it raw to the robot.
Greg McKaskle