Switch Browser Tabs with a Rotary “Tuner”

We’ve all been there, you start researching a part for your next project, open a new tab to research something related, check your email, Twitter, etc., and all of a sudden you have wayyy too many tabs open. While you can tab through with your mouse, or even ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab on Windows PCs, your browser needs to be active. How much cooler would it be to be able to tab through open web pages with a dial, as if you were tuning a radio?

That’s just what Zoé and Elen of came up with, in the form of the Fully Automated WebTuner. While it started out as a somewhat silly idea, the device turned out to be quite useful, allowing one to scroll through pages without even activating the browser to activate a shortcut.

Hardware-wise, the WebTuner uses an Arduino Uno for control, and a rotary encoder to tab through everything. A Firefox extension handles things using Native Messaging to get from the USB/serial port to the browser interface.

Code for the project can be found on GitHub, along with a 3D-printed knob/ThinkPad fixture design. You can see the device demonstrated and more on how it was built in the video above.