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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

That's a pretty fun project, but it's a bit sad that the electronics were lifted form an existing keyboard.

Are mindstorms flexible enough to emulate USB HID?

edit: it looks like mindstorm EV3 is bluetooth-enabled. I don't know the details, but it might be possible to get it bound as a bluetooth keyboard, and thus to have a fully functional "pure-lego"[0] bluetooth keyboard.

[0] the mindstorm EV3 brick runs a Linux distro on a 300MHz ARM9 core with 64MB RAM and 16MB flash (plus a SDHC slot). Whether this remains "pure lego" may be up to debate.

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LEGO purists generally admit anything produced by the LEGO company, plus generic consumables like batteries as specified.

So a sticker from an original set is allowed, but printing your own sticker isn't; any 9V battery will do in a 9V battery box, and any SD card in an SDHC slot, but not a newly made extra-long wire to carry power out to a motor.

There are companies that make LEGO-compatible bricks, which range from execrable quality to slightly better than LEGO's own, but none of that would qualify.

All that being said, I don't know of anyone who maintains LEGO purity except in competitions and exhibitions with specific rules. LEGO themselves often produce large sculptures with an interior support armature which is not made of LEGO products.

Sure, but in this case the lego part is kinda minor, it's a basic sculpture but the logic is lifted from and the layout imposed by the original keyboard's contacts.

You can't create a better, more flexible or completely different keyboard (e.g. recreate a symbolics keyboard, or a typematrix layout)

You could always go the Arduino route

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/MouseKeyboard

easy to flash and run own distro on the ev3 as well for example https://github.com/mindboards/ev3dev or lejos if you want the jvm. the ev3 is a fair bit of fun, not as flexible as arduino (obviously) but it ain't too bad.

The distro is less of an issue than the IO, more specifically the ability to have the ev3 be seen as a HID (USB or bluetooth)

Yeah, I lost all interest in the story after seeing this.

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