--- Doug Jackson <doug at stillhq.com> wrote: I have had similar difficulties. I have been unable to buy new keyswitches, so have resorted to desoldering them from junked keyboards. Some older PC keyboards are constructed of individual keyswitches, as are the keyboards used in the Apple IIe. The last project I needed to make a keypad for I used parts from an Apple IIe keyboard that was badly broken and missing keys (school surplus eh.. pile..). I wouldn't scavenge parts off anything _useful_. Or keytops, for that matter. I have in the past bought surplus keyboards from a place online, but they weren't ASCII encoded - they were unencoded. I am actually using one now, I interfaced it to the keyboard encoder from a crummy Compaq USB keyboard and I use it on my Mac. Never seen ASCII keyboards for sale online like that though. -Ian

On 3/21/07, Doug Jackson <doug at stillhq.com> wrote: The last time I needed an odd keyboard, it was for a 5x5 matrix to test my MatrixOrbital serially-attached 20x4 text VFD input circuit. I took a bit of bare protoboard and populated it with bare pushbutton switches I'd harvested out of clock radios and broken TV sets. The buttons aren't expensive in and of themselves, but I wasn't able to receive shipments for several more months and didn't want to wait for the next mail plane. I think it took me a couple of hours to wire it all together and up to a 10-pin molex header to cable over to the display. I would rather have used veroboard - it would have taken much less than an hour. Fortunately, I had about 30 switches on hand. More recently, I picked up some IBM leased-line modem front-panels specifically because they had a hex keypad with double-shot keytops with the hex digits in them. One place I'd use them is with an 1802 and a 74C923 matrix scanner. Dunno where you'd find them as components these days, though. I've been looking for hex keypads at hamfests for years and only recently spotted these. -ethan