HIDuino

[ryantheleach]

I tried to submit this as front page news...

The HIDUINO is a set of firmware for the ATmega8u2 used in the new revisions of the Arduino  (Uno, and Mega2560 for example).  Once the HIDUINO is loaded your Arduino can show up as any HID compliant device you wish, no extra drivers necessary. This means that using this firmware, you can easily wire up arcade controls and have them act as keyboards, joysticks and more.

Note a little more work is required then the gamewiz or ipac but it is still fairly easy for anyone interested enough.

http://hackaday.com/2011/03/28/hiduino-the-only-limit-is-yourself/

[leapinlew]

Interested, but how do I acquire one of these?

[ryantheleach]

many places, its open source hardware so you could theoretically build one yourself...

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Buy

is the easiest way to obtain one, just make sure that its either an arduino uno or  Mega2560.

---hmm after further inspection the HIDuino project only supports midi...

after futher investigation I'd suggest going for the "teensy" and using the Teensyduino, add-on for Arduino IDE: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

[MonMotha]

Interestingly, USB MIDI isn't HID at all

The LUFA library is a very powerful, fairly easy to use library for those USB AVR microcontrollers.  It won't directly support the Arduino macro language, though, so you'll have to be fairly comfortable with embedded C programming to use it.

[Blanka]

It also works with older Arduino. You can just buy the latest Atmel chip with firmware and plug it in your old board. The chip is just 5 bucks or so.

[Paul Olson]

thanks for posting this! I have a spare Uno to use.

[Howard_Casto]

Sounds like a good idea until you actually read the article.  All you are doing is re-programming the device with different code each time using a avr programmer.

In other words... it's a avr.  Any avr can be re-programmed to show up as a HID device so long as someone has written some USB code for it. 

What you want is a device that can be re-programmed via the usb cable.. that means easier re-proramming and re-programming on the fly.

There are much cheaper/better options... like a teensy as you've pointed out.

Hell I'm not even a fan of the "arduino" thing.  It's just a atmega chip (or similar)... the "arduino" part is the programming language/library and there are tons of languages you can use to program AVRS.  Better yet, the code is out there to be messed with... just do a google search.