BEST OF BREED
Tactile inputs
he Pimoroni
Button SHIM may
be the smallest,
and most discreet,
keyboard-like
input available
for Raspberry Pi. OK, it’s a
button bar, but isn’t that what all
keyboards really are anyway? The
Button SHIM gives you five
physical buttons, along with a
handy RGB status LED.
An interesting aspect of this
SHIM is the ability to solder it
into the GPIO pins and still allow you to use a HAT or
pHAT at the same time. Alternatively, you can solder on
the included female header and use it as a simple
standalone board. Installation of the required software
couldn’t be easier: just one line of code typed into the
terminal and the package will be installed. Head over to
the Pimoroni website to learn more.he PS/2 Keyboard to ASCII
Converter from Adafruit is a simple
solution for producing a single TTL
ASCII character on the ‘press’ of a
keystroke from a standard, and
ubiquitous, PS/2 keyboard. We’ve
made a lot of different projects using old PS/2
keyboards, and this breakout board is a lifesaver. It’s
designed to offload the complex keyboard decoding
of PS/2 keyboards. This allows your microcontroller,
like an Arduino, to tackle other
tasks. And as we all know, your
Arduino is always happy to
have a little extra help.
All you have to
do is plug in a
standard PS/2
keyboard
in one
end and start
typing, while your
Arduino receives
the specific
keystrokes via a little
code. You can also use it to
break out magstripe and
PS/2 bar code readers. It
comes ready-to-go and
requires no soldering.T
T
Button SHIM PS/2
Keyboard to
TTL Serial
Converter
PIMORONI $30 shop.pimoroni.comADAFRUIT $17.95 adafruit.comRight
A very handy
addition for
your Raspberry
Pi projectAbove
Adding a PS/2
keyboard –
made simpleA discreet way
to add button
input to your
Raspberry Pi.VERDICT
8 / 10
A simple
solution for
adding a full-
size keyboard
to your project.VERDICT
8 / 10
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