Pieter mentioned an interesting device called AlphaSmart ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart ) on Twitter the other day. It’s sort of an electronic typewriter/typing trainer and was apparently popular in the education market.
It’s a neat device. Small, rugged and with a long battery life, it would make a nice tool for writing in the field.
Among other things it had an interesting “synchronization” mode where it could be attached to a computer via the keyboard port and then dump the contents of its memory into an editor on the computer as if it were a person typing the data in.
This seems like something that could be recreated using an Arduino, so I’m noodling on this and collecting some of the pertinent information here for reference.
This board may be able to do most of the heavy lifting (character LCD with integrated AVR processor): https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10097
Arduino library to act as a keyboard: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/MouseKeyboard
// jjg