Re:I made a thing to help you make a thing out of a keypad
by HeyLaughingBoy on Friday April 12, 2024 @08:50AM
(#40012000)
It's hard to make money building hobbyist-level hardware and selling it to hobbyists. Selling it to commercial users is another story altogether!
I can buy a 5" 800x400 TFT color touch screen with an onboard 32-bit processor that has I2C and SPI ports that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. And for good measure, implementing an onscreen keypad is already built into the libraries available for it.
Cost is around $30 on Aliexpress. I have a couple of them and they are amazing for the price. A github project has sprung up around these devices: https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display
I think the author already knows this :-)
The primary goal in this project appears to be "fun", not "provide a cheap option for reading keypads".
I mean, the author ate the pain of learning-to-Rust-on-the-STM32, uses it for no discernible gain for a project of this scope, and for good measure adds in a home-written embedded OS.
For something of this scope no multi-task-driven design is necessary, and an 8051-or-cheaper uC with an i2c peripheral and ISRs reading with a while(1) loop writing is more than sufficient.
I attempted making and selling a thing like this (integrating 2x16/2x32 character LCD and keypad) waaaay back in 2003/2004, but the number of hobbyist uC developers just didn't make it worthwhile.
Today, with the arduino already a grandaddy in relative terms, everyone and their dog is doing embedded, so might be a good time for me to relook at all-in-one i2c peripherals for hobbyists.