My homemade keyboard dock station - $17 B-]

[JustinMueller8810]

Re: My homemade keyboard dock station - $12 B-]

My bag is kinda small, and I try to travel as light as possible since I do a lot of walking around. My freshman year I used to carry around a 17" laptop and deadweight charger--plus textbooks and notebooks. It was absolute murder lol. I had back-to-back classes a mile apart, it was probably the most exercise I ever got. Since then I vowed to travel as light as humanly possible.

You can find that specific bluetooth keyboard for around $30 on ebay; it's hard to find foldable keyboards for much cheaper, so all things considered it's reasonably priced. I'm all about resourcefulness though lol. My last keyboard was a USB keyboard case, which didn't hold the device securely so I superglued a TPU case inside (here). Keyboard case was $8, TPU case was $5. I only stopped using it because my OTG cable started having issues and would disconnect at the slightest movement.

Isn't that keyboard/case combo too small to type on O,O

 

[JustinMueller8810]

Re: My homemade keyboard dock station - $12 B-]

For anyone with external keyboards, especially if you have leftover Play credit, I would highly recommend the External Keyboard Helper Pro app. When you select it as your keyboard, you can assign functions to certain keys--so my F1/2 are brightness adjusters, F3-5 are volume, F12 opens Hovernote, etc. Very useful .

Ok so this sounds awesome, but I have been attempting to get my keyboard set up with this this for like 20 minutes and I still don't understand how to set up things such as Brightness up or Brightness down etc etc.
PLEASE HELP! THANKS!

 

[anon(924308)]

Re: My homemade keyboard dock station - $12 B-]

Ok so this sounds awesome, but I have been attempting to get my keyboard set up with this this for like 20 minutes and I still don't understand how to set up things such as Brightness up or Brightness down etc etc.
PLEASE HELP! THANKS!

Yeahh it's pretty confusing and totally unintuitive, it took me forever to figure it out. Here's their 'getting started': Get started / Tutorials - Apedroid

To assign features to certain keystrokes (e.g. brightness, volume), go into Advanced Settings > Customize Keyboard Mappings > Add New Keyboard Mapping
1. Where it says 'Scancode', press the key you want to have the function. It'll automatically enter its scancode (whatever that is lol)
2. Press the checkmark next to Keycode; it'll change the type of mapping you're doing. You should now see a drop-down menu with different features, like brightness up/down
(just a note--certain functions don't work, probably because of the device itself and not the app--for example, I can't get the volume mute to work, but vol up and vol down work just fine).
screenshot:

Here's their link for how to to app shortcuts: apedroid: EKH Tutorial 5 - Application shortcuts and Text strings
Basically, go to Advanced Settings > Application Shortcuts
1. You'll see a blank list, ranging from A0-AF. Click on any one of them and assign an app to it.
screenshot:

2. Go back out and head to Advanced Settings > Customize Keyboard Mappings > Add New Keyboard Mapping; this time, you'll use the other type of mapping
3. Like you did before, press the key you want to have the feature assigned to; its scancode will show up.
4. Do NOT press the checkmark by keycode. You should now see the options: "Normal", "Shift", etc; this is how you assign what happens to the key when it's just normal, when it's pressed in combination with "shift", etc.
5. Next to each, enter the letter/number next to the application shortcut you chose. So for me, next to "Normal", I'd enter A0 for Hovernote. If I wanted that key to open Chrome when combined with shift, I'd enter A1 next to "shift". Once you enter the combination, it'll automatically change it to "0x24"etc, and you should see the symbol for the app next to it.
screenshot:

Hope that clarifies some things. and lol yeah, the 8"x3" keyboard was tiny as hell. But I got used to it, and was actually able to type relatively fast on it. But I'm glad I can finally retire it .