Re: OT: How to detect a keypress, and in which language?

[Hugo Vanwoerkom]

Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Kent West wrote:
Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Kent West wrote:
Too bad; I think a lot of the hams would have enjoyed writing a 
simple little program to turn their PCs into a Morse keyer.


I am no radio hammmer (?) no morse code since I was a boyscout 60 
years ago. But I would think that one would rather use let's say the 
space bar as a key for either dit's or dah's. Or alternatively just 
type text and the program would translate in dit's and dah's. More 
interesting would be to use the key and see if the program can read 
what is being keyed.


The space bar as a keyer would be fine as a straight-key (just the 
single up-down paddle you see in the movies about the Old West), but I 
was thinking more along the lines of emulating a paddle (two side-ways 
keys mounted back-to-back, so that your thumb produces dits and  your 
fore/middle finger produces dahs as you barely move your hand 
left-right-left). But it would be trivial to modify the program from 
one mode to the other. The hard part, as we've all discovered, is 
reading the keys while bypassing the buffer and controlling the speaker.

That would indeed be interesting for the program to recognize and 
display what is being keyed; that would be a good training aid for 
producing clean code; if the computer can't read your hand, the ham on 
the other side of the world will have trouble reading it also.


Aha! Good explanation. Forgive the ignorance. I did not know about the 
'paddles'.

Let me give the single up-down paddle a try. It appears that amidst all 
the uncertainties here one cannot "depend" on a wait interval *always* 
to be that long to one's ears. This in relation to both the sound 
duration and the wait between sounds.


Guess what? kbhit() returns a non-zero value at a variable rate: between 
65 and 300 ms. So you cannot distinguish between rapis key strokes and 
holding a key down.

Hugo




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