New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

RE: New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

thinkengineer — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 08:47:57 GMT

Thank you so much for this great advice Clem, Kulky64 & shabazz. We will totally be working on incorporating the zero, # and take into consideration reducing the size of the numbers etc (all in the process now). We are focusing on the HAT for now and maybe launch an Arduino kit in the future. Its great to get your feedback and hope you stay in touch for the future development we make with it.

Cheers

RE: New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

shabaz — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 01:23:17 GMT

I think you guys could make it a bit different, and market it better too.

As the guys above say, the numbers make little sense, maybe better to have then blank, let people put stickers on them with arrows, etc or an overlay. I get the coder needs a key reference, but it could be a small number on the silkscreen generally not easily visible. Pressing a capacitive Shift plus another button would allow for an additional 8 buttons effectively, so there could be a demo overlay for that too perhaps.

Also, why restrict to the Pi, there is a whole community of Arduino users too; maybe better to save costs, ditch the EEPROM for the HAT (it is fairly useless), and the long DIL header socket (expensive!), and instead supply a few jumper wires.

I'd spend the saved money on an I2C expander and through-hole pins left unallocated (or a SIL pin header), let the user wire up some LEDs if desired to it, or an LCD display (they can be controlled via I2C, or from a port expander with a bit of code effort) or even a buzzer, or even for a future board from you guys that augments the keypad with a display. Anyway, by leaving them unallocated the user has more options, it is no incremental cost for you (except for the port expander but you're saving on the EEPROM removal) and you could create some how-to's using some popular displays.

RE: New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

clem57 — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 14:47:59 GMT

I am curious why no "0" "*" and "#" to create a full phone keypad interface?

Clem

RE: New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

thinkengineer — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:10:18 GMT

Thank you for getting in touch. The CapHat only uses one GPIO pin (GPIO17) the rest of the connections are either power/ground or I2C. It has connections to GPIO2 & 3 for the capacitive sensing and connections to ID_SC & ID_SD for the EEPROM.

When the product launches on KS we have various pledges on offer. An Early Bird deal at £14, the standard price at £18 plus an education offer where you get one and a school gets one for £25.

We will be going live on KS on 14th November so hope to see you there.

Cheers

Wendy

RE: New Keypad HAT for the Raspberry Pi - The CapHat

fvan — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:52:31 GMT

Can you give an idea of the price during and after the KS campaign?

How many GPIOs remain available/which ones are in use?