Comment The manufacturer sells the board they use... (Score 1) 57
So the item you linked to is made by PI Engineering. If you peruse their website you will find that they sell both USB and PS/2 versions of the boards that live inside their gizmos. But since you sound a bit concerned about price, you probably won't like the fact that they sell them for $60 on their webstore.
I actually have a (USB) version of the X-Keys editor, and it has one particularly nice feature which supposedly all of their models support. Instead of acting just like a keyboard, it sends the data to the USB consumer page (or something like that), which allows you to have a dedicated application that polls the status of the various buttons and jog/shuttle, rather than having them just sent to the current application. This gives you boolean status on all keys. (They provide source and DLL's for windows to do this. I don't believe there's any howto for linux yet.)
I will also say that their gizmos are solidly built and have good tactile feedback. That's very important. Sadly, the USB cord attached to mine was a little on the short side (3 feet?), so I had to get an extender for my setup.
I actually have a (USB) version of the X-Keys editor, and it has one particularly nice feature which supposedly all of their models support. Instead of acting just like a keyboard, it sends the data to the USB consumer page (or something like that), which allows you to have a dedicated application that polls the status of the various buttons and jog/shuttle, rather than having them just sent to the current application. This gives you boolean status on all keys. (They provide source and DLL's for windows to do this. I don't believe there's any howto for linux yet.)
I will also say that their gizmos are solidly built and have good tactile feedback. That's very important. Sadly, the USB cord attached to mine was a little on the short side (3 feet?), so I had to get an extender for my setup.
