Pi_keyboard

Explanation

I started this project as part of my A-level computer science course. The purpose of this project was to create a virtual keyboard that would run on a raspberry pi zero (see end for photo). The project was unrealistically ambitious as is typical of early projects and was only ever partially completed. I have slightly cleaned up the project and am releasing it... I don't really know why

The project was written in python and uses tkinter to create the UI

Using the application

to run the application, just run Keyboard.py

The keyboard was meant to be able to send characters to other devices, but this functionality was never implemented. For this reason the send() function is used as a placeholder for sending a keypress to another device, it currently just prints the character to console

Profiles

The project was meant to allow the user to create and store profiles and this functionality is implemented... badly

The profiles are stored in text files, named Profile1.txt, Profile2.txt and so on. each profile contains:

• The keyboard layout (qwerty, colemak or dvorak)
• The background colour, as a hexcode
• The foreground colour, as a hexcode
• The active background colour, as a hexcode
• The active foreground colour, as a hexcode
• The character that will be output when the unicode character is pressed

The currently selected profile, followed by a list of all profiles, including the currently selected one are all stored in Profiles.txt

Making it fullscreen - not recommended

The project was initially intended to run on the touchscreen of a specific raspberry pi, the UI is therefore designed for a window of a specific size, when the project was initially created, the keyboard ran in fullscreen but when running the program on a different machine it best to run it as a window. I have therefore changed the interface to run in a window of the correct size, if you really want to run it in fullscreen, you can change the global variable fullScreen to True I do not recommend this

Documents from original project

When making the project I also had to make a write up. I have included said write up as Project-Write-Up.pdf incase it is of use. I have also included a photo I took of the project when it was running on the Pi Zero, as Demo.png, it is shown below: