Handmade: Programmable keyboard for online trading do-it-yourself
Users of the forum for investors and traders Bear Bull Traders often discuss issues of gadgets for trading on the exchange. In one of the threads, a participant named Ryan shared his experience of turning a digital panel on a keyboard into a specialized gadget with hot keys for ultra-fast trading. We have prepared a detailed adaptation of his story.
Step # 1: Iron
There are specialized gadgets for online trading - we talked about them in a blog. Some traders use keypad X-keys XK-24 , but its cost is quite high, so the author of the topic refused this option.
Image: xkeys.com
Keyboards and keypads for gamers also did not work for various reasons, for example, Stream Deck from Elgato worked only under Windows 10, but it was necessary to work under the "seven".
Image: elgato.com
As a result, it was decided to turn an ordinary USB keyboard into a trader's tool - for this it was necessary only to reprogram its keys in some way so that it could send trade orders to the trading terminal in one touch.
Before proceeding with the reprogramming, it was necessary to decide which keys would be responsible for what, and mark them accordingly. Ryan developed a special label listing the hotkeys, cut out new designations from paper and glued them to the selected keys. In the end, it looked like this:
Step # 2: soft
To reprogram the keyboard, the HID Macros program was used . It was a personal project of one developer who decided to rewrite the system in a new programming language. The project is no longer being updated, but the latest version of the program works quite well. HID Macros can be customized by this detailed guide .
Everything works quite simply. For example, if you need to program a key with the number seven on the keyboard so that it prints the letter b when pressed, then you need to connect the keyboard, open the program and detect the device using the Scan function. Then you will need to click on the key to be reprogrammed and select a new action by selecting Send keyboard sequence and pressing the desired key. After that, the configuration is saved, and the key begins to behave in a new way.
Result
As a result, you can get a second keyboard, on which hot keys are configured to perform the necessary operations. After that, you just need to connect the device to your computer and configure the hot keys in the trading terminal. Other forum users also tried to experiment and, for example, create a specialized trading keypad (shown in the title picture of the topic).
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