<p>Turin is the hometown of Arduino. I have been at the <ahref="http://fablabtorino.org/">fablab</a> multiple times but I had to come all the way to America to get my hands on a simple Arduino Uno.</p>
<p>For 60$ I bought a cheap (but still good!) mechanical keyboard by Qisan, a clone of the Arduino Uno and a USB host shield.</p>
<p>Given that is 3 years since I have been using a dvorak layout and it's a pain to change layout on every machine that you have to use.
You can imagine that given this three pieces of hardware together I put together an hardware key mapper for the keyboard.</p>
<p>I have never had experience with Arduino before but it was not that difficult to make it do simple things like blinking the led or send signal through to a serial monitor.</p>
<p>It took me half an hour to wear down all my excitement: the USB Host Shield library broke all the compatibility with the similar project I found wandering online.</p>
<p>In particular <ahref="http://hunt.net.nz/users/darran/">this blog</a> has the most precious information and the guy wrote a HID driver that allows the Uno to be seen as a HID device.</p>
<p>It was a noob error but I didn't checked the various arduino alternatives and I discovered late that just a few have the HID capabilities that would make this work easier. I should have bought and Arduino Due or Leonardo maybe.</p>
<p>Also, the various guides about flashing with a dfu tool are specific to older models of the Uno and it took me some time to figure the name of the new components so that I could flash a new firmware.</p>
<h3>A small journey in the Arduino world</h3>
<p>It feels pretentious to write a little guide for this kind of work, given also the fact that I have roughly 10 hours of experience with the Arduino. But the other resources are really outdated so I hope this piece can be useful to someone out there.</p>
<p>All the files I have used today are on <ahref="http://francescomecca.eu:3000/pesceWanda/arduino_HID_keyboard">my repos</a> and I included also an outdated version of the USB Host Shield library that I used.</p>
<p>The original code from this <ahref="http://hunt.net.nz/users/darran/weblog/c6f35/Arduino_USB_Keyboard_Passthrough.html">blog post</a> works like a charm but just as a simple passthrough.</p>
<p>It was not difficult at all to examine the code:
during each loop of the iteration a char array gets read from the shield and if it is contains information Arduino with the Serial.Write method send the data to the host.</p>
<p>The buffer array is a simple array of length 8 and the first two positions are reserved. In particular the first one represent the various modifier keys.</p>
<p>The dvorak layout has the same pairs as the US layout but eventually I got used to having the '@' where at the same place of 'Q' (qwerty) and '"' over the '2'.
Also, I am an avid vim user (I should thank Simone Basso for that) and I swapped some keys on the new 65 keys keyboard.
The modifier bit at the beginning of the array came in handy for my code.</p>
<p>An hardware key remapper is a simple but long switch C statement but I decided to consider also the modifier bit: in this way certain keys like the Window (UGH!) key is mapped to a different layer of keys.
I got all the codes for the HID events <ahref="http://www.freebsddiary.org/APC/usb_hid_usages.php">here</a>.</p>
<p>The process of flashing the code on the Uno goes like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>write the looping code;</li>
<li>push it to the Arduino using the IDE;</li>
<li>shortcircuit the board so that it goes in DFU mode;</li>
<li>flash the .hex HID firmware;</li>
<li>try your code;</li>
<li>repeat until it's right.</li>
</ul>
<p><imgalt="Everything fits in one picture"src="../../../../../wp-content/uploads/2016/IMG_20160706_011304.jpg"></p>
<h3>Flashing the firmware</h3>
<p>The firmware is in my repo but I got it from (here)[http://hunt.net.nz/users/darran/weblog/a6d52/Arduino_UNO_Keyboard_HID_version_02.html].
The tool I used to flash it is dfu-programmer (version 0.62).
Every time you want to flash a new firmware the Arduino must be put in DFU mode (you can see the difference with lsusb).
To do that simply create a shortcircuit using a small metal wire on the two pins near the reset button and a led will blink.
This <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8XyRwXQr8Q">video</a> shows the method briefly (no real need for a jumper).
The commands are the following and there is no risk to brick the Uno:</p>
<p>After each flashing the device needs to be disconnected once. Of course you can flash the original firmware back. It is included in my repo or on the official ones.</p>
<p><imgalt="Arduino and the shield"src="../../../../../wp-content/uploads/2016/IMG_20160706_011143.jpg"></p>
<p>That's it, as you can see is not difficult at all. The worst part is gathering the various info that are left dormant in blogs or forums.</p>
