Making a Mouse or Keyboard Emulator with the Arduino Leonardo

So you’ve played around with an Arduino before, and you can make an LED blink, but have you ever made a keyboard or mouse emulator?  It’s dead simple now, thanks to the new Keyboard and Mouse libraries for the Arduino Leonardo. In this workshop, I’ll show you how to use the Keyboard and Mouse libraries, and we’ll make our own mouse and keyboard devices. Bring your favorite sensors, components to attach them to an Arduino, and  materials and we’ll make some game controllers together to use with laptop and brower-based games. I’ll have some Leonardos on hand for people to work with.

Since you’ll learn the basics of making a keyboard or mouse emulator in the session, we’ll have a competition in the second hour:  Make a game controller that can play the Chrome version of Angry Birds better than anyone else in the room, and you get to take home a Leonardo. Top ten scorers win. BYO sensors and anything else you need to go with them.

In this session I’ll assume everyone knows the basics of working with Arduino, and has enough knowledge to attach an analog sensor to an Arduino and program it to read the sensor. We’ll break into groups or individuals in the second half and build working projects. So bring your parts!