On 11 April 2017 at 11:53, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 09:41:24PM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
I'd like to do that, but I think there are a few more steps involved. Want to help out? Can you point me to a detailed HOWTO for doing this? I'm not an electrical engineer, but I can solder, I have basic programming skills, and I can probably lay hands on a ROM burner if needed. But it seems translating the output to USB is may also be an added challenging step ... Any help appreciated.
Well the thinkpad keyboards don't have a rom, or any map. They have a raw matrix apparently, and you need a controller with a lot of input puts to read the keyboard state and turn that into key codes.
From looking at what you linked to, it seems you would need some small processor that can work as a USB client device to pretend to me a USB keyboard, and also has some 35 to 40 inputs that can be connected to the keyboard.
It does sound like quite a bit of work to figure out.
There is a chip, and a project, for that sort of thing. The Atmel processors (recently discussed by Peter Hiscock) include some quite suitable to the task, notably the Atmega32U4 http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATmega32u4 There's a project for managing keyboard firmware for various keyboards using that chip, and it includes some "I built my own from scratch" options... https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"