Re: OT: How to detect a keypress, and in which language?

[Hugo Vanwoerkom <hvw59601@care2.com>]

Kent West wrote:
> Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
> > Kent West wrote:
> > > Too bad; I think a lot of the hams would have enjoyed writing a 
> > > simple little program to turn their PCs into a Morse keyer.
> >
> > I am no radio hammmer (?) no morse code since I was a boyscout 60 
> > years ago. But I would think that one would rather use let's say the 
> > space bar as a key for either dit's or dah's. Or alternatively just 
> > type text and the program would translate in dit's and dah's. More 
> > interesting would be to use the key and see if the program can read 
> > what is being keyed.
>
> The space bar as a keyer would be fine as a straight-key (just the 
> single up-down paddle you see in the movies about the Old West), but I 
> was thinking more along the lines of emulating a paddle (two side-ways 
> keys mounted back-to-back, so that your thumb produces dits and  your 
> fore/middle finger produces dahs as you barely move your hand 
> left-right-left). But it would be trivial to modify the program from one 
> mode to the other. The hard part, as we've all discovered, is reading 
> the keys while bypassing the buffer and controlling the speaker.
>
> That would indeed be interesting for the program to recognize and 
> display what is being keyed; that would be a good training aid for 
> producing clean code; if the computer can't read your hand, the ham on 
> the other side of the world will have trouble reading it also.

Aha! Good explanation. Forgive the ignorance. I did not know about the 
'paddles'.

Let me give the single up-down paddle a try. It appears that amidst all 
the uncertainties here one cannot "depend" on a wait interval *always* 
to be that long to one's ears. This in relation to both the sound 
duration and the wait between sounds.

I played with playing 'SOS' in the background (=forked) and I never get 
anything recognizable:
http://www.esnips.com/doc/da934a43-a63a-4276-b39c-a4cb385444fa/do_dit_dah_working


Hugo