Missing your Strand 500?


For those of us who are occasionally ridiculed for referring back to the desk that we once knew and loved, I have bodged this Strand Designers keypad to work with the ETC EOS. Kindly donated by a friend this original designers remote has 71 actual Cherry keys, with the familiar click of a Strand 500 console, not a nasty membrane keypad in sight. The device was originally used with a 510i backup unit or a designers PC so you didn’t have to remember the shortcut keys. These shortcuts are embedded in the hardware, with a single PS/2 connection to the device you wanted to control.

I have removed the original PS/2 cable and implanted a Teensy2.0 USB microcontroller, allowing me to remap the Strand keys to EOS functions, and use a normal USB connection to a EOS PC or console. Wait becomes Follow. Preview becomes Blind. You get the idea. Its just for fun… but you could use it for a bit of offline programming. Or just to remember what nice keys felt and sounded like.

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