Super GO Button

It's much better than a regular GO button.




What's a Super GO button? It's pretty much a GO button that controls more than one system or makes two or more unrelated things happen at once.

I mentioned earlier that I was working on a show that required two video projectors that were run by a pair of laptops. In addition to running video for the show I was running sound too. What I needed was something I could use to advance the slides on the laptops at exactly the same time using only one hand so I had the other one free to handle the faders on the mixer. This is what I came up with:




It worked great, only took me a couple of hours to build, and it used junk I had laying around in the shop.




The two USB connectors go into the two laptops. Whenever you push the button, the two laptops think you just pressed their space bars and the slides advance.




To build it I first took apart two USB keyboards. I figured out which pairs of contacts on the PCBs triggered the space bar and soldered them to the contacts on a relay (for information see this keyboard hack article). Then I wired the coil of the relay to the big red illuminated button (the power for the light and the relay is provided by the wall-wart). I printed the nifty "Super GO" logo with my laser printer on an overhead transparency sheet. The whole thing is mounted inside of a plastic/aluminum project enclosure.

There you have it. Ghetto show control at its finest.

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