Designing and building a drop-in replacement keyboard for the 100/102 would be far easier than trying to bodge together some gadgets to make it use a USB keyboard, and compromising the portability of the thing.
That said, just swapping out a failed switch with a working one is even easier than that. There's got to be something out there for replacements... On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 2:10 PM Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > An MT8808 is the magic piece you are missing here. It's the part most of > these matrix keyboard glue interfaces use, that and an off the shelf > arduino, pico, esp32 etc type device to do the USB and/or RS232 end (and > also if you can be bothered fun stuff like scripting or even keyboard over > wifi) > > On Tue, 8 Jul 2025 at 18:29, Joshua O'Keefe <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Jul 8, 2025, at 10:01 AM, Thomas Morehouse <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> Being a card-carrying expert in absolutely nothing ... What about using a >> USB keyboard,running into a USB to serial cable, to the RS232c port. >> >> >> My first expected complication here would be that just because a USB >> keyboard somehow fits a USB to serial cable (it doesn't) that doesn't make >> it a USB host or make an HID device somehow send serial data. Overcoming >> that would probably be the first bit of design challenge: if I were >> tackling it from this angle, I'd have to put a device between them to act >> as host for both the HID device and the serial transceiver and to run your >> software to do this. And to provide power to the rig. >> >> Then having some code in ROM/RAM to make the USB keyboard output mesh >> with the M100/2 keyboard reading circuit? >> >> >> It's an assumption on my part but it shouldn't be too hard to stuff bytes >> from the serial port into the keyboard buffer, but RS-232 isn't going to >> just plug into a keyboard matrix without yet another custom device to light >> up the matrix itself. >> >> My bet here is that just fixing, rigging, or replacing the keyboard is an >> order of magnitude easier than two custom microcontrollers, two custom >> PCBs, two pieces of different custom software, and a lot of custom wiring. >> I'm not very bright, though, compared to some of the folks who have done >> some clever and amazing engineering work on this platform. >> > -- Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.) Thanks /usr/games/fortune
