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fdufnews edited this page Jul 13, 2015 · 8 revisions

Welcome to the Chatpad wiki!

This wiki will explain how to use the Xbox Chatpad as a peripheral for an Arduino.

The Chatpad is a small keyboard (the size of a phone) it has 47 keys, it can be found on the net for nearly nothing (10$ on ebay) making it an affordable input peripheral for the Arduino.

Cliff L. Biffle has written a library for the Arduino. On his site he explains how the Chatpad works and how to wire it to the Arduino.

So why a new library

First, my problem was that my Chatpad was an AZERTY one. So I have made some modification to the original library in order to use the french keys layout.
Second, I had from time to time loss of synchronization between the Chatpad and the application. The Chatpad needs a continuous dialog with the application. The application shall send a pair of frame every 78ms in order for the Chatpad to stay active. In the application I was using, sometimes the tasks were monopolizing the processor for periods of time longer than 78ms and the Chatpad was entering "sleep mode" and the sync was lost. So I have added a method that is called when the frame is not recognized by the "driver" in order to resynchronize the data stream between the Chatpad and the application.

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