Taking Quizbowl buzzers and connecting to a computer
Is there anyway that I can somehow connect this to my computer so that every time I click the button, it sends the signal of the enter key on my keyboard? Preferentially something that uses usb to reconfigure the signal.


Yes you can do both.

Find a secondhand USB keyboard. This shouldn't cost you anything. Open it up and removed the keyboard controller PCB.



Figure 1. (1) The PCB and contacts. (2) and (3) the matrix keyboard which you'll be dumping.


Examine the keyboard matrix before you dump it and see if you can find which contacts are the 'rows' and 'columns'.
Plug in the keyboard.
Go to http://www.keyboardtester.com/.
Using a wire select a row and jumper it to each column in turn while monitoring the online keyboard tester. If you don't find the Enter key on the first row then repeat the procedure for the next row, etc.
Connect the two Enter terminals to a phono socket and then you can plug in your original controller without modification.


I used the controller in the photo and the contacts were covered with some kind of coating which wouldn't take solder. It scraped off quite easily and I soldered the wires on.

I developed this technique to make a foot-operated switchboard for controlling a slide show while playing the guitar. I stopped testing when I found the combinations I wanted.

Table 1. The Lenovo keyboard matrix.



You could wire several of these controllers to send the key signals '1', '2', '3', etc., to a program or even to WordPad set to a very large font. You would see the keypress sequence on the screen as '213' or similar but if someone holds down the button you might get '21111113'.