Woot!
Some serious progress. In no particular order:
- Non-functional keyboard was traced to a (surprise) badly corroded stereo
phone jack. What threw me was that plugging in a straight Switchcraft
That's good. That can't be dificult to repair, there are only 3 contacts :-)
plug for continuity checking showed everything ending
up where it should.
After I took off the side of the unit, I discovered that the right-angle
molded plug on the keyboard cable does not get inserted far enough to make
a reliable connection. This looks iffy even at best, but I'll start by
I've had this sort of thing before where a connecotr will not go fully
home when the casing is fitted.
Sicne you have a plug that will go all th eway in, maybe you could make
up a short rxtension leand (plug to socket) so that both connecotrs will
fit properly. It won't be original, but you can easilty unplug it if you
want an 'original' machine for any reason.
replacing the jack. By removing the daughterboard
that carries it and
plugging the keyboard into it directly, the computer sees it. That's the
good news. The bad news is that (also surprise!) there are a lot of dead
keys. So perhaps I spoke too soon about it being intact. I have a Sun 4
These keybords are an electrical matrix of capacitors. Individual dead
keys are almost always due to the pads, complete rows or columns msising
could be problems with the driver chips. There are custom, but there
aren'yt that many varienats, so iy'd likely you can find some on anotehr
old keyboard.
I think I'd take the keybaord apart again amd inspect those pads. Remove
a good pad from a working key plunger, and with the keyboard PCB
connected uip, try it on each of the pairs of pads on said PCB to see if
the machine thinks that key has ben pressed. If all the positions o nthe
PCB works, the problem is nothign more than the pads.
I cna problaby find soem information on the ICs used if you need to go
that far.
-tony