Being used with the Scissor Keyboard on my Apple Macbook Pro for more than 7+ years i have become a fan of these Keyboards. I have used the Wired and Wireless Magic Keyboards. All these keyboards last longer and more durable until you protect them with a proper cover. I lost some external keyboards as i failed to use a cover. These Apple keyboards are so costly and you can’t repair them once something goes wrong. For sometime i was using the Karabiner Utility for MacOS to manage with the Broken Keys. Later i decided to say Good Bye to these Apple Keyboard and went to Buy a DELL Keyboard which almost similar to the Chiclet Keys of Apple Keyboard. So now, what i do with these Apple Keyboard. I don’t want to put in trash as most of the keys are working well. Earlier I was looking to build a one click Launch Pad to initiate/Trigger some of my Home Automations. Then i decided to use this Apple Keyboard (USB) connected to my Raspberry PI and control everything. Now i have 90+ buttons with various combinations to control the automations.
All these key presses are captured through a python keyevent listener script which in turns detects the pressed key and runs appropriate script controlled through a NodeRed Flow.
apple-keyboard-on-window.jpeg
Currently i have configured almost 10+ keys
0 => Shutdown Everything (Including PI)
1 => Switch on Work Laptop
2 => Switch on Bamboo Laptop
3 => Switch On Internet
4 => Switch on Study Light
M => Play my Favourite Music
E => Restart PI
Space bar => Play or Pause any Playing Music from Raspberry PI (Fored-Daapd)
N => Play my another Favourite Playist
K => Send my Daily thoughts to Kindle
import keyboard
import time
import requests
def key_press(key):
#NodeRED API Url called for executing the action
strUrl="http://127.0.0.1:1880/rpi-switch?key={0}".format(key.name)
requests.get(strUrl)
keyboard.on_press(key_press)
while True:
time.sleep(1)
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