Morse code USB keyboard

Further exploring the capabilities of Arduino Micro as an input device, I made a telegraph key that works as a regular USB keyboard. Here's a demonstration (please excuse my lack of Morse code skills):



For the input part I used the CapacitiveSensor library. The way it works is there's a send pin and a receive pin. You put a resistor between the two pins (I used 1 megaohm) and then also connect a piece of metal to the receive pin that will act as the sensor that you touch. I used a copper coin soldered to a piece of wire. (One serious limitation of capacitive sensing done this way is that the Arduino needs to be grounded, so for example it may not work well with battery-powered laptops.)

I also added a buzzer for feedback, the one I used makes a sound when the signal pin is driven low.

Here's the sketch that's running on the Arduino. As you can see the transmission speed is fixed (though it wouldn't be hard to make it adapt to the observed speed).

If you're a Morse code enthusiast, I also recommend my Android application that listens to Morse code using your smartphone's microphone and translates it to text.