engineering university course, so I am still a beginner at electronics. At this point, I don’t even know how to read schematics, and I have very little understanding of how microcontrollers work.
I wanted to build a simple input device for the PC, as a way to get started on learning. I was interested in making an tiny keyboard, consisting of maybe 1 to 5 keys and an LED light. I wanted to have each key correspond to a character or command, and I also wanted to turn the LED on or off though software. I was hoping this would be a good way to learn, and I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestion on a book that would introduce me to electronics by diving straight into that field (input devices/keyboards).
If anyone has any suggestions, I would be very interested in hearing them.
These days with USB being the standard, it’s a lot harder to implement a keyboard interface than it was with the older PS/2 inputs. If it’s the actual keyboard interface you want, be prepared to do a lot of reading of the USB standard if USB is the only option you have for your project.
On the other hand, if a serial interface is good enough, you might want to start with an arduino since it’s already fabricated and has all of the hardware you would need to get started programming microcontrollers. If it were me, this is the option I would start with because a lot of the difficulty with the electronics is already taken care of. Furthermore, much of the microcontroller’s I/O is easily connected to other circuits and you might find yourself ahead of the class if you ever end up taking a class that uses the arduino in some form.
If you don’t mind, I have one more question to ask you.
With arduino, would I be able to have a keypad with LED lights underneath each key, and have those LED lights change to indicate software events? Also, is it possible to adjust the voltage on these LEDs to make them dimmer or brighter?
I have also found this book on Amazon, that could be helpful as well.