Homemade Arduino laptop / palmtop thingy

This past weekend, I saw a friend with a new eeePC, and I got a bit jealous, so I decided to try to make my own. I'll admit it's not the most advanced thing you've ever seen, and it certainly doesn't run Open Office (yet - ha), but at least it's a start. And I'll have to say it definitely turned more heads at Starbucks than his eeePC when I met back up with him a couple hours ago to show it off :-)

Here's a close-up picture of the Arduino, TouchShield, DoubleWide ExtenderShield, and Lithium Backpack, sitting on top of the Happy Hacker keyboard:

When I turned it on, I could see this faint green glow from the Arduino underneath, which looked really cool:

The Happy Hacker keyboard is a simple PS/2 keyboard (nothing fancy), so it only needed to be interfaced with two pins (Data and Clock), as well as +5V and Ground. You can barely see how I plugged Data and Clock into pins 4 and 5:

And this is my first test, with the text "hello world....":

And here's a little video of me showing it off :)


Arduino and TouchShield pretending to be a laptop from Matt Bitz on Vimeo.

All the source code is over at the projects page on liquidware.com