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.

Emergency mute button

Don't you hate it when one of the fifteen tabs you just opened decides to autoplay some video with an obnoxious audio track? Pressing the mute key on my keyboard just doesn't convey the feelings I have at that moment. I want to hit something hard. That's why I made this emergency mute button:



It connects over USB and speaks the regular HID protocol, so it works with any computer with no additional software or drivers. I got the button itself for 7 dollars on eBay. Inside it there are two screw terminals that are normally connected and get disconnected when you press the big red button (to connect them again you have to twist the button). I connected one of the terminals to one of the digital pins on an Arduino Micro and the other terminal to the ground pin.



Then it was a matter of writing the software for the Arduino that would send the right key events over USB to the computer. Arduino Micro is based on the ATmega32u4 chip (like the Leonardo), so it can act as a USB keyboard out of the box. Problem is, by default the library only knows how to send regular key events, not media keys like mute or volume control. So it requires a slight modification, adding the appropriate HID descriptor and key events. Fortunately I didn't have to figure it all out by myself, because Stefan Jones provided a helpful description of the modifications necessary. With that all that was left was writing the simple sketch reproduced below. It reads the pin that the button is connected to and when it detects a change, it sends the mute key event. (You will notice a slight problem with this: it sends the same event to mute and to unmute the audio. So if the state of the button is out of sync with what the computer thinks, it will work the other way round.)

int sw = 2;

void setup() {
  pinMode(sw, INPUT);
  digitalWrite(sw, HIGH); // pull-up
}

int prevstate = 0;

void loop() {
  int state = digitalRead(sw);
  if (prevstate != state) {
    prevstate = state;
    Remote.mute();
    Remote.clear();
    delay(5); // debounce
  }
}

Google Authenticator watch

TIMESQUARE is an LED matrix watch, sold by Adafruit in kit form. It has an ATmega328 chip inside, which is interesting, because it means it is programmable using the Arduino IDE. That opens up several possibilities. You could design your own watch faces or you could extend lunchtime by an extra 12 minutes every day. I thought it would be cool to turn my watch into a 2-step authentication token for my Google account.

If you enabled 2-step authentication on your Google account (which you should definitely do, BTW), you know the way it works is you have an app on your phone called Google Authenticator that displays six-digit codes that change every 30 seconds. When you log in, you enter the currently displayed code in addition to your password. That way when bad people get a hold of your password, they still cannot use your account, because they don't have the code. (BTW, this isn't specific to Google accounts, the authentication scheme is described in RFC 6238 and is used by other services like Dropbox and LastPass. You can even set it up so that your own servers ask you for a code when you ssh into them.)

Where do the codes come from? When you set up 2-step authentication, the service (for example Google) gives you a secret that is then stored in the app (it's usually done through a QR code so that you don't have to type in long sequences of numbers). The app generates codes by taking the secret together with current time and performing some cryptographic operations on them (mostly the SHA-1 hash function). There's no reason we can't do the same on our TIMESQUARE watch and indeed someone has already implemented the algorithm on Arduino. I took that implementation and put it as another display mode on the watch, showing the six-digit code using the marquee effect normally used to display time.



If you want to try it on your watch, you can download the code here. You will need to install Adafruit's original code for the watch and their GFX library in your Arduino IDE. You're also going to need a way to program the watch from your computer. I used Adafruit's FTDI Friend. They have a tutorial on how to do this.

The authentication secret is currently hardcoded in the TOTP.ino file. I should probably make it so that it's possible to set the secret using the buttons on the watch, but right now you're going to have to set it manually in the hmacKey1 variable. Google gives you the secret in Base32-encoded form, but you can easily convert it to an array of bytes using the following Python code (remove the spaces from the Base32 string Google gives you):

import base64
print ', '.join([hex(ord(i)) for i in base64.b32decode('JBSWY3DPEHPK3PXP')])

Be aware that compiling code using the Arduino IDE can leave some intermediate files in the /tmp directory (or its equivalent on other operating systems). You should clean them up to remove traces of the secret from your computer.

Laser tripwire

Somebody call Catherine Zeta-Jones, because I have a laser tripwire.



I made it using an Arduino, a laser diode, a photocell (light dependent resistor) and a piezo buzzer. The laser and the detector are in the same place, so it requires a mirror to bounce the laser beam off (this way I only need power in one place). Here's what it looks like on a breadboard:



The laser diode is just connected to 5V and ground, so it's always on. The piezo buzzer is connected to digital pin 3 on the Arduino and ground so that we can sound the alarm when the laser beam is broken. The photocell is connected in a voltage divider configuration. One leg of the photocell is connected to 5V, the other to ground through a resistor and to analog pin 0 on the Arduino. The way a photocell works is that it changes its resistance depending on light intensity. When the laser beam hits it, the resistance will be lower than when it doesn't. With the voltage divider, we can read a value on the Arduino's analog pin that will depend on the photocell's resistance and thus detect if the laser beam was broken.

The output voltage in the voltage divider depends on the values of the resistors in the following manner:

V_out = R_fixed/(R_photocell+R_fixed)*V_in

Depending on the photocell's resistance range, we choose the value of the fixed resistor so that we can have a reasonable threshold value for the output voltage.

Here's the sketch that's running on the Arduino.

const int PHOTOCELL_PIN = A0;
const int BUZZER_PIN = 3;
// voltage readings are in 0-1023 range
const int THRESHOLD = 500;

void setup() {
  pinMode(PHOTOCELL_PIN, INPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

long alarmEndTime = 0;

void loop() {
  int level = analogRead(PHOTOCELL_PIN);
  Serial.println(level);
  long time = millis();
  if (time < alarmEndTime) {
    long timeLeft = alarmEndTime - time;
    if (timeLeft % 1000 > 300) {
      tone(BUZZER_PIN, 4000);
    } else {
      noTone(BUZZER_PIN);
    }
  } else {
    noTone(BUZZER_PIN);
    if (level < THRESHOLD) {
      alarmEndTime = time + 3000;
    }
  }
}

Blinkenlights

I think we all agree that every computer is better with blinking lights. In an effort to overcome my fear of electronics, I have recently acquired an Arduino and one of my first projects was a CPU load indicator for my computer:



It was of course inspired by the blinkenlights on BeBoxes and the way it works is very simple. I got a 10 segment LED bar graph and two six-pin 330 ohm resistor networks (they're just five resistors in a single package with one leg of each resistor connected to the sixth common pin). I connected the positive legs of the LEDs to ten digital pins on the Arduino and I connected the negative legs to ground through the resistors. Here's what it looked like during testing:



Then I needed a way to tell the Arduino which LEDs to turn on. An obvious choice was to communicate over USB (which will also provide power). Here's the sketch that's running on the Arduino:

const int FIRST_PIN = 3;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
    pinMode(FIRST_PIN + i, OUTPUT);
  }
}

void loop() {
  if (!Serial.available()) {
    return;
  }
  int cpu_load = Serial.read();
  int n = (cpu_load+5)/10;
  for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
    digitalWrite(FIRST_PIN + i, i<n ? HIGH : LOW);
  }
}

And here's the Python program that's running on the computer:

import serial
import psutil

ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyACM0')
while True:
    cpu_load = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=0.1)
    ser.write(chr(int(cpu_load)))

As you can see it sends a byte with the CPU load value (0-100) ten times per second. I only tested it under Linux, but the psutil module should also work on Windows and OS X. It can also give you per-CPU core percentages, but that would require more LEDs and some other way to drive them when we run out of I/O pins on the Arduino.

USB audio dock for Android

If you want to get audio from your Android device to your speakers in a transparent (not application-specific) way, there have traditionally been two options: Bluetooth and the 3.5 mm jack (I guess MHL and HDMI are also valid options on some devices). Android 4.1 introduced another way: audio over USB. This has one additional benefit: you don't have to plug in an additional cable for the phone to charge. Problem is, I'm not aware of any actual products like audio docks that would make use of this feature. So I decided to make one myself.



I used a simple USB dock and a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi's audio output is connected to my living room amplifier. Below I describe the steps necessary to make this work.

Obviously you'll need a dock that matches your phone's physical shape (or you can skip the actual dock and just use a USB cable). The Raspberry Pi could be replaced by any computer running Linux. The Pi is a good fit here because of its small size. Then again it is a bad fit because its audio components are low quality (this could be worked around by using HDMI as the audio output or connecting an external sound card via USB, but I haven't tested these options).

The good thing about Android's audio over USB feature is that it uses a standard protocol, so if you connect your phone to a modern Linux box, it just shows up as an audio input. Therefore we only need to do two things here: enable the audio over USB feature after the device is plugged in and route the sound from the input to the output that goes to the speakers. We'll use a simple Python script to send the necessary magic over USB and PulseAudio for the audio routing.

I used a Raspbian "wheezy" image on the Pi, if you're using another distribution (or not using a Raspberry Pi), some adjustments may be necessary.

First, install git and PulseAudio:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio git

Use git to install a newer version of PyUSB than is available in Debian repositories:

git clone https://github.com/walac/pyusb
cd pyusb
sudo python setup.py install

Next we configure PulseAudio. Edit /etc/defaults/pulseaudio to start the daemon at boot and allow module loading:

PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=0

In /etc/pulse/system.pa change the line that says:

load-module module-native-protocol-unix

to:

load-module module-native-protocol-unix auth-anonymous=1

(This will allow us to use the pactl command without worrying about authentication.)

Add the following line to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

resample-method = trivial

(I don't know why this is necessary. It wasn't needed on my regular PC, but audio wasn't working without it on the Pi.)

Then create a file named /etc/udev/rules.d/dock.rules and put the following line in it:

ACTION=="add",SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="04e8",ATTR{idProduct}=="685c",RUN+="/home/pi/phone_docked.sh %s{idVendor} %s{idProduct}"

This will run /home/pi/phone_docked.sh every time my phone is connected. As you can see, unfortunately the USB vendor and product IDs for my specific phone are hardcoded here (they are then passed to the script as parameters). You'll need to change them to match your phone (you can look up the IDs by running lsusb with the phone connected). I don't know how to write a udev rule that will trigger when any Android phone is connected (instead it's probably more feasible to write a rule that matches Android phones and also some other devices and then just try to talk to it as if it was an Android phone and gracefully handle the situation if it doesn't respond).

The phone_docked.sh script does two things, first it runs the Python script (android-usb-audio.py) that enables audio over USB on the phone (passing along the vendor and product IDs), then it loads a PulseAudio module that routes the audio from the phone to the default output. Here's what the script looks like (put this in /home/pi/phone_docked.sh):

#!/bin/bash

/home/pi/android-usb-audio.py $1 $2
(sleep 3s ; pactl load-module module-loopback source=`pactl list sources short | grep alsa_input.usb | cut -f 1`) &

As you can see, the second part is not very elegant, it just waits 3 seconds where it should wait for the PulseAudio source to actually show up. Also it assumes there are no other USB audio sources.

Finally, here's the Python script that sends the necessary USB magic to the phone. This tells the phone to send audio over USB. The script gets the USB vendor and product IDs from command line parameters (put this in /home/pi/android-usb-audio.py):

#!/usr/bin/env python

import usb.core
import time
import sys

dev = usb.core.find(idVendor=int(sys.argv[1], 16), idProduct=int(sys.argv[2], 16))
mesg = dev.ctrl_transfer(0xc0, 51, 0, 0, 2)
# here we should check if it returned version 2
time.sleep(1)
# requesting audio
dev.ctrl_transfer(0x40, 0x3a, 1, 0, "")
# putting device in accessory mode
dev.ctrl_transfer(0x40, 53, 0, 0, "")

(The magic numbers come from the Android Open Accessory protocol.)

Give the two scripts executable permissions:

chmod 755 /home/pi/android-usb-audio.py
chmod 755 /home/pi/phone_docked.sh

And that's it, reboot, connect your phone and enjoy audio coming from your speakers. (I know what you're thinking: all this work just to avoid plugging in the 3.5 mm jack??)

Since the phone will charge from the Pi's USB port, you should use a power supply that will be enough for the Pi and for the 500 mA that the phone will draw.

I'm not demonstrating it here, but while the phone is connected, you can also send HID commands like play/pause/next/previous to it. This way you could make some physical (or web) controls for the dock and pass them through to the device.

While you're at it, you could plug a Bluetooth USB dongle to the Rasbperry Pi and make your dock also accept audio via Bluetooth. There are tutorials on the web showing how to do that.