Is there some clever way to use the state of the CAPS LOCK key as a data source for interface feedback?

Questions
1

Hey there.

Im setting up a project to be used when teaching. since i do not have a complete set of midi controllers for all students in the class, i will make two different versions of my project, one using the midi conbtrollers, and one using the built in keyboard.
In my usual project i have a launchpad mini and a nanokontrol2 as the MIDI controllers.

To be able to have almost as many keys as i have pads on the Launchpad, i want to set up some of the controls to be the normal keys, and some of them to be controlled by the same keys, but with Caps Lock pressed.
So far nothing is nontrivial. But:

I would really like to have some indication inside my VDMX interface on the status of the CAPS LOCK button state. In all normal usecase situations the caps lock acts as a modiufier key, and therefore should bnot be recognized as a normal button press in VDMX, but in theis case i do not want the caps lock to control anything but a few new toggle buttons in the control surfaces i already have in the user interface. These should have the sole function of beeing activated and therefore beeing red when the caps lock is on for the part of the interface that reacts to the CAPS lock on parts of the interface, and on the other part of the interface beeing red when the caps lock is not activated…

I imagine there might be a secret code i can write into the button reciever field to reach the state of the CAPS LOCK button state. I naively tried writing Caps Lock hoping to do magic, but no dice. Is this possible?

Im aware that it makes complete sense not to use this as a normal data source in most situations, but for the interface feedback situation i describe here it would make sense to have this state available as a data source.

VDMX5ScreenSnapz007
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Thanks for the help! Lau

3

Hey Lau,

It isn’t possible to get the state of the caps lock key as a data-source in VDMX – it is only applied at the system level to modify other keystrokes before the input is passed off to us.

4

okay. thanks for the answer! Would be cool though…

5

I was going to suggest that you could try using the ‘modifiers’ object in Max and send that over OSC / MIDI, but it doesn’t look like it updates properly when Max is running in the background…

6

@davidlublin I Need it to be absolutely Plug and Play, so no workarounds involving installing extra frameworks, programs running in the background and patches etc… on a bigger number of student computers when making short classes. But thanks for the effort anyway!

7

Kineme’s freeboard patch might work, but it does rely on a plugin, so it doesn’t fully fit the criteria. Haven’t tested it in awhile but it used to work quite well.

http://kineme.net/release/FreeboardPatch/01

8

My thought was to go with control surface… that is only triggered when the caps lock is down…which would need some coding to look and see if the caps (or a control surface button really) is on or off. We were looking to do this with VDMX awhile back… to emulate video switching hardware (MX-50 anyone?). But, never got a “toggle” button like this to fly.