Hobnobbing With The Knob | Hackaday

The scroll wheel may possibly be the ideal thing that occurred to the laptop mouse considering the fact that, perfectly, the computer system mouse. But from time to time you want anything a little extra tangible. For instance, with a program-described radio set up, it doesn’t really feel correct to scroll your mouse to adjust frequencies. That is in which [Wagiminator]’ USB knob would occur in useful. Marrying a 3D printed situation, some addressable LEDs, a rotary encoder, and a CH552E microcontroller, the knob appears to the host operating program as a regular USB keyboard. That signifies most applications can use it with no any special drivers or application.

There’s truthfully not a great deal to the components. A custom made PCB retains two WS2812’s, the very small CPU, the encoder, and the USB plug. There are a handful of random discrete parts, also, but not a lot of. All the things you will need is on the task web page. The PCB structure, the application, the schematics, and the 3D print data files. The code that does the primary function is particularly straightforward. The USB code is a little bit additional intricate (search in the involve listing) but actually, it is not as bad as most USB examples we have viewed.

This job is ripe for hacking. The program is straightforward plenty of to modify quickly. The 3D printed circumstance wouldn’t be really hard to spruce up or print in distinctive colors. Adhering to the instance, this would make a realistic core for a custom keyboard peripheral that applied unique keys alternatively of a rotary encoder.

Knobs can be easy or complicated. If you want our consider on the odd quantity control, we applied sonar.