A Dog — or Child — Bite Has Killed Your Standing Desk? Do Like Doug Barry and Fix It!
An Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller and USB macropad stand in for a chewed-up motorized sit-stand desk's control panel.
System administrator and maker Doug Barry has brought a dead powered sit-stand desk back to life, by building it a new control panel powered by an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller.
"I was gifted the remaining parts of a height-adjustable desk from a family member. The surface of the desk was being re-used for something else, and the control panel (keypad) was non-functional," Barry explains. "That had suffered from either a dog bite, or a child bite, we'll never know. Either way, the bite had severed what I later found out was the trace to GND."
The original control panel was simple enough: five domed switches, each of which pulls its particular line to ground. Pressing a switch activates the desk's motor — lowering or raising the desk surface to pre-set or custom heights — but only if the contact is actually made. While it should be possible to repair the broken trace, Barry opted instead to throw away the original panel and build something new.
Using a cheap five-key macropad connected to an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller, acting as a USB Host, Barry was able to replicate the functionality of the original controls — only now with pleasing mechanical keyswitches. "Sure enough," Barry says of the experiment, "the desks motorised functions still worked."
The project is documented on Hackaday.io; source code has been uploaded to GitHub under the permissive MIT license, though Barry describes it as a "minimum viable product and not my best work!"