18 Sep
2007
18 Sep
'07
12:43 a.m.
On Monday 17 September 2007 18:24, Tony Duell wrote:
Somewhere I think I have a bare keyboard (no keycaps or case, but real
switches as opposed to the junk plastic sheets you get with some these days),
and it has a ROM-less part in there and an eprom next to it.
I find that, I'm gonna read that sucker out, see if I can make some kind of
sense out of it... :-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
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,