After seeing a few keyboard related hacks, most recently the keybot at hackaday, I wanted to try something similar. I made a neat looking function key box using the guts of an old keyboard and a button box from a piece of industrial equipment.

This picture shows the finished result. Three lighted buttons that act as F9, F10, and F11. The lights are always on and everything is interfaced with USB using the controller form the old keyboard. I setup VirtuaWin to switch between three desktops using these keys. I have a fourth input which acts as F12 but have not decided what to do with it yet.

The same hack could be used to read various signals into your PC. A foot switch for example or a custom gamers keypad maybe. Some of you may be wondering why not just press the function keys. Well that would not be cool and besides my keyboard has the function keys used up as application buttons. I have to press a separate key to activate the F1-12 key functions.