<metaproperty="og:description"content="So you want to create your own membrane keypad? Why? well making your own keypad can be useful for many reasons. It’s cheap and easy to…">
<metaname="twitter:title"content="Create Own Membrane Matrix Keypad (and Hooking It Up to the Arduino)">
<metaname="twitter:description"content="So you want to create your own membrane keypad? Why? well making your own keypad can be useful for many reasons. It’s cheap and easy to…">
<metaname="twitter:image"content="http://blog.thebestjohn.com/images/matrix/finished.jpg"><metaproperty="article:author"content="John Warren"><metaproperty="twitter:label1"content="Published at"><metaproperty="twitter:data1"content="February 16th 2010 00:00:00"><metaproperty="twitter:label2"content="Written by"><metaproperty="twitter:data2"content="John Warren"><linkrel="icon"href="/images/icon.png"><linkrel="alternate"href="/atom.xml"type="application/atom+xml"title="TheBestJohn"></head><bodyitemscopeitemtype="https://schema.org/WebPage"><navclass="menu"id="menu"><divclass="menu-inner"><divclass="menu__left-area"><divclass="menu__item"><aclass="menu__item__link menu__item__link--brand"href="/"title="Home"rel="home"><imgclass="menu__item__link--brand__image"src="/images/icon.png"alt="TheBestJohn"><spanclass="menu__item__link--brand__label">TheBestJohn</span></a></div></div><divclass="menu__right-area"><divclass="menu__item"><aclass="menu__item__link"href="http://blog.thebestjohn.com/">Home</a></div><divclass="menu__item"><aclass="menu__item__link"href="http://blog.thebestjohn.com/about">About</a></div><divclass="menu__item"><aclass="menu__item__link"href="http://blog.thebestjohn.com/archives">Archives</a></div></div></div></nav><divclass="page-background"></div><divclass="content-container"><divclass="content-outer"><divclass="content-inner"itemscopeitemtype="https://schema.org/Blog"><articleclass="article"id="article"itemscopeitemtype="https://schema.org/BlogPosting"><h1class="article__title"itemprop="headline">Create Own Membrane Matrix Keypad (and Hooking It Up to the Arduino)</h1><divclass="article__meta"><timeclass="article__meta__time"datetime="2010-02-16T05:00:00.000Z"itemprop="datePublished">February 16th 2010</time><divclass="article__meta__categories"><aclass="article__meta__categories__item"href="/categories/Other-electronics/">Other electronics</a></div></div><divclass="article__contents"><imgsrc="/images/matrix/finished.jpg"/><p>So you want to create your own membrane keypad? Why? well making your own keypad can be useful for many reasons. It’s cheap and easy to do, it can be placed in situations where it may be vandalized or stolen without much frustration, It can be fully customized to display whatever you like, and you can make as large a keypad as you like with as many inputs as you can handle. I created my keypad to go on the exterior of my door in residence to act as a keypad entry in much the same way as colin353 did (here)[<ahref="http://www.instructables.com/id/An-Electronic-Door-Opener/]"target="_blank"rel="noopener">www.instructables.com/id/An-Electronic-Door-Opener/]</a>. I however have some more tricks up my sleeve for this coming up in a later Instructable.</p>
<p><em>**</em>NOTE: This is not a complete instructable for the time being. It goes through the construction of a keypad fully, however it does not yet fully explain or demonstrate the means to make it useful. This will change</p>
<p><strong>NOTE:</strong> This is not a complete tutorial for the time being. It goes through the construction of a keypad fully, however it does not yet fully demonstrate the means to make it useful.</p>
<h1id="Step-1-Understanding-the-Keypad"><ahref="#Step-1-Understanding-the-Keypad"class="headerlink"title="Step 1: Understanding the Keypad"></a>Step 1: Understanding the Keypad</h1><p>The first thing I want you to understand is how this keypad works. I know what you’re thinking… Matrix keypad?… “I’m not going to have to take any blue pills to get this to work am I?”. No its not that matrix.. The best way to think about a matrix style keypad is to think about battleship.</p>
<p>A matrix is pretty much a grid like in battleship consisting of rows and columns. each button corresponds to a certain row and column. See the first picture to help illustrate this better. On a 9 button keypad you would use 3 rows and 3 columns. The first button would make a link between Row 1 and Column 1 (R1C1) just like in battleship. 2 would be R1C2, 3 R1C3, and lets say 8 would be R3C2… the rest are illustrated on the image.</p>
<p>The point of this is instead of having 9 different buttons to wire up, all you would need to do is wire up 3 columns and 3 rows for significantly less wires. The real benefits come when you begin adding buttons. adding another row and column (2 wires) would add 7 buttons… see where I’m going?</p>
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@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
<h1id="Step-4-Mapping-Out-Your-Cheap-Matrix"><ahref="#Step-4-Mapping-Out-Your-Cheap-Matrix"class="headerlink"title="Step 4: Mapping Out Your Cheap Matrix"></a>Step 4: Mapping Out Your Cheap Matrix</h1><p>What we are going to be doing is gluing on foil to make a flexible, cheap, however effective circuit board. What we need to do now is on our computer mock up we need to make how our columns and rows are going to be set-up. If you are using Photoshop make 2 new layers, one called rows the other columns. if you’re just using paint make a copy of the file called rows and another columns.</p>
<p>On these new layers we will put large black lines where we want our “Circuits” to go. See image 2 for rows and image 3 columns if you are confused. Image 4 shows what both layers turned on looks like. Starting to look familiar?<br>Now you need to flip one of your images vertically… or is it horizontally… see image 5 you’ll get what I mean.</p>
<p>Go ahead and print these out for the next step.</p>
<h1id="Step-5-Faux-Circuit-Making-Time"><ahref="#Step-5-Faux-Circuit-Making-Time"class="headerlink"title="Step 5: Faux Circuit Making Time!"></a>Step 5: Faux Circuit Making Time!</h1><p>!()[images/matrix/realhoriz.jpg]<br>!()[images/matrix/realboth.jpg]</p>
<h1id="Step-5-Faux-Circuit-Making-Time"><ahref="#Step-5-Faux-Circuit-Making-Time"class="headerlink"title="Step 5: Faux Circuit Making Time!"></a>Step 5: Faux Circuit Making Time!</h1><p>!(horizontal foil)[images/matrix/realhoriz.jpg]<br>!(both foil pieces ready to be joined)[images/matrix/realboth.jpg]</p>
<p>Here is the fun part… well in my opinion the whole thing is fun but whatever…<br>Now that you have your printed out templates you can start making your circuit. Now is the time to glue down your foil where ever your rows and columns are supposed to go. Look at figure 2 for both of my circuits, yours should look somewhat like this. Also, notice how my leads go away from the keypad in an organized way to facilitate easy hook-up? Just like I planned!</p>
<p><strong>NOTE</strong> At this point its a good idea to re-make your front design to include labels for the hookup at the end of the leads with the labels<br>R1<br>R2<br>R3<br>C3<br>C2<br>C1</p>
<p>This is just going to make it easier for you.</p>
