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Quest for the Whistler Button

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Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with "disabilities" often have to buy off the shelf equipment made for the mass population, and then adapt it for their needs since most products aren't designed with them in mind.

But ... braille buttons!

You can buy Dymo labellers that output braille.

https://shop.rnib.org.uk/braille-and-labelling/labelling/bra...

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with "disabilities" often have to buy off the shelf equipment made for the mass population, and then adapt it for their needs since most products aren't designed with them in mind.

But ... braille buttons!

It doesn’t look (in the clip posted above) that the Braille is on the buttons themselves, but rather a label applied by the character, e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=braille+label+maker&ia=images&iax=...

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#13
post #2

As someone who has never seen Sneakers, I would have loved a clip of the button press that spawned this journey. What did it sound like?

Do yourself a favour and go watch that movie. There is a huge Hollywood sized grain of salt needed any time you deal with: Hacking, Computers, Internet, etc.. but this movie is EXCELLENT at showing 'Red Team' activities, social engineering, physical bypasses, and true historical hacking (debugging an IC to see what it does). There is great comedy, action, and intrigue in this film and should be in the top 3 of any ne…

My voice is my passport. Verify me.

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#14
I recognized the buttons immediately as they are fairly common in vintage synths of Roland, Korg and Sequential among many others.

And at least in my Mono/Poly the button is clearly not a single component but a combination of a tactile switch with a led and the cap.

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#15
At around the same time, 1990 - 1992, a partner and I made a rack mounted utility unit that included a tuner, a metronome, surge protected outlets and rack lights. We used buttons almost identical to these from Digi-Key. Mouser was also a big vendor of ours.

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#18

Ha! The buttons in the movie were braille-labelled and had a red led when active . Why the LED? It reminds me of the braille on drive-thru ATMs.

aside from it being embossed tape added after market:

blind covers a lot of ground. the ability to discern a red led against a black background when you're a couple feet away is well within the realm of blind

Re: Quest for the Whistler Button

#20
I thought these looked familiar, I have product that uses them, but a version with dual LEDs. The CFFA3000 hard drive / floppy emulator for the Apple ][ used them in a floppy disc control panel.

https://shop.dreher.net/shop?olsPage=products%2Flimit-3-per-...

http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c=projects/CFforA...

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