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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.

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.