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Collecting keyboard-interfaces, hi all.

kbdbabel

New Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2009
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Location
Cologne, Germany
Hi all,
about three years ago I have started a project "kbdbabel", keyboard protocol translators, www.kbdbabel.org.
First there were just two hand-knit adapters: IBM-PC/XT and Sun4/5/6 to PS2.

But in the meantime, the project grew, today there is a collected documentation
for more then 50 distinct keyboard interfaces available www.kbdbabel.org/conn,
some signaling diagrams www.kbdbabel.org/signaling,
schematics www.kbdbabel.org/schematic,
rom images www.kbdbabel.org/rom
and more then 20 different microcontroller based keyboard protocol translators available, as open source
http://kbdbabel.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/kbdbabel/.

Most of those keyboards are dated between the mid 70s and mid 90s,
a time where lot of manufacturers started to build detachable keyboards,
everyone with one or more different interfaces.
This was the time between build-in-keyboards and standard keyboard interfaces like PS2 and USB.

In a few words,
I am collecting keyboard-interfaces.

Alexander
 
By the way, the pins marked "?" on your PC1512 keyboard schematic are mouse buttons; they appear to short to ground when the button is pressed, and the keyboard controller then generates scancodes for them.

For the Amstrad PCW, the schematic in the service manual says the pins are

1=+5v
2=Gnd
3=Data
4=Clock
Code:
  ___ ___
 /   u   \
/         \
|(1)   (4)|
\ (2) (3) /
 \_______/
but doesn't make clear whether that's meant to represent the solder side or the pin side of the plug.
 
For the Amstrad PCW, the schematic in the service manual says the pins are...

Well, it's wrong. The correct pinout is this:
kb_socket.svg
.

The protocol used seems to be similar to the PC1512 (with both lines normally high, and Clock going low when a bit can be read from Data). I don't have exact timings at the moment, but a keycode is 12 bits, MSB first. The high 4 bits are the offset in the host's RAM (relative to 3FF0h in memory bank 3), and the low 8 bits are the value to write.

More details can be found in section 10 of my PCW hardware information document.
 
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