17 Sep
2007
17 Sep
'07
11:24 p.m.
I picked it up for fifty cents at a swap meet in the
hopes that it
might be an ASCII keyboard that I could use in an Apple I replica,
but given that it has a 40-pin DIP socket, it's clearly not (it was
That 40 pin socket is presumably fro some kind of encoder chip, either a
dedicated encoder or a microconttoller programmed to scan the matrix and
detect key closures.
If the latter, you should be able to find the clock components on the PCB
somwhere. It's likely to be a 8048 or 8051 chip if it is a
microcontroller, see if the pinouts of those could make any sense at all
with the connections on the PCB.
very early in the morning, what can I say). It has a
five-pin power
header on the top left, two red LED indicators, the aforementioned 40-
That 5 pin header is likely to be serial daa output (or maybe clock+data)
as well,
-tony