/esp32-touch-ble-keyboard

A 3d printed touch based bluetooth keyboard built on ESP32. This project was born due to my now broken laptop keyboard and a lying around esp

Primary LanguageC++GNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

esp32-touch-ble-keyboard

A configurable bluetooth keyboard that utilizes the touch sensors on ESP32 as keyboard keys to send keystrokes to the connected device

demo.mp4

why???????

Since the past few months I've been noticing that when travelling with my laptop some keys (2, w, s, x, f5-8) were just not responding on the hardware level. Smacking the keys multiple times seemed to bring them back to life until i travelled with my laptop again.
But as time passed, even that method to beat life into my keys became a lost hope.

I didn't feel like spending on a new keyboard and I had an esp lying around, so......

3d Printed case

custom case i designed to mount on my laptop's SD card reader to make the "keyboard" even more portable

preview the 3d *.stl files directly in github -->

[note: final designs are different than the rendered video cuz i cant be bothered to update the video when the design updated too \o_o/]

Everything.Assemble.V2.mp4

How to use

Pre-requisites

open the project in VSCode and install platformio extension

Keys layout

  • define the pins and their corresponding letters you want to use in the file: includes/KEY_CONFIG.h

  • inside the TOUCH_KEYS array, initialise your keys using the format:

    TouchKey( <<pin number>>, '<<letter to press>>', <<optional threshold for *this* pin>> )
    

    (refer sample config in that file)

for the pin number, make sure to refer the pinout diagram of your ESP board and select the touch pins only (touch pins are prefixed with T)

Bluetooth device properties

  • you can edit the device's bluetooth name, manufacturer's name & the battery level in include/CONFIG.h

after you're done configuring, build the code and upload to your board

ToDo

  • improve touch processing algorithm to imitate a real keyboard's
  • make a 3d printed case

Credits

This program uses the amazing ESP32-BLE-Keyboard library made by T-vK