Loading drivers from an SD card

Drivers (defining which keypress corresponds to which switch) are now loading from SD. The device bus is scanned on startup, and because each device emits its internal ID, the corresponding driver is located in the SD card and loaded.

Getting SD to work on a Leonardo was a pain – don’t use pins 11, 12 and 13 for SPI as 99% of tutorials tell you – use the pins on the ICSP header, which is on the back edge of the Leonardo, next to the “Made in Italy” caption. The SD library in version 1.0.3 of the SDK works fine without any modifications if you use these pins. More details in this instructibles page.

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Full matrix keyboard on Leonardo

So now I have a matrix keyboard (just 2 rows x 2 columns for testing), with full masking and ghosting protection. There is still a little noise I need to filter out. Here it is being tested with Strike Fighters 2.

This is the prototype. The bottom board holds the CD4021BE (rows) and 74HC595 (columns). The top board has the four switches plus diodes that make up the ‘keys’. The third chip you see is another CD4021BE, which is used to store the device ID.

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Controlling Strike Fighters 2 from the Arduino Leonardo

UPDATE (9/1/2014): If you are looking to build a project like this, see my post on the Rabbit Engineering Model I1 device.

So this happened:

That’s an Arduino Leonardo using its keyboard emulation mode to control the landing gear in Strike Fighters 2. At $25, the Leonardo is almost half the price of an iPac2, but being a fully programmable microprocessor, promises to allow hundreds of inputs rather than the couple dozen provided by the iPac.

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