I'm a newbie to arduino but have been programming in many languages for over 20 years. I wanted to use an old access-is keyboard that I came across. It turns out that this keyboard does not come with drivers for mac or linux so I'm looking to arduino to help me. I've attached the following pictures from the keyboard.
I also read some articles on how to read in matrix keyboards and how matrix keyboards are represented as columns and rows and you have to keep scanning them to see what is clicked ...
I have the following questions:
What connector (and from where) can I purchase so that I can connect the rainbow cable from the keyboard to a breadboard and from their to an arduino.
What arduino should I purchase
Would it be easier to purchase a USB shield and reverse engineer the io for the keyboard? If I go down this path will the usb shield provide enough power to power this keyboard?
What connector (and from where) can I purchase so that I can connect the rainbow cable from the keyboard to a breadboard and from their to an arduino.
What arduino should I purchase
Would it be easier to purchase a USB shield and reverse engineer the io for the keyboard? If I go down this path will the usb shield provide enough power to power this keyboard?
Rainbow connector? I see an 30 pin FFC connector. Why so many pins? It looks like the keyboard is laid out 10x10. I can't tell if it is 1mm or 0.5mm but at some point you will need something like this:
Not exactly easy to breadboard with., not impossible either.
Do you have a continuity tester? First thing I would do is experiment with the contacts on the end of the FFC connector gently to see if I could determine the organization of the keyboard. I would stick a key down and probe one pin and drag the probe across the others. Assuming no continuity, I would move to the next pin and do the same. At some point you should have continuity between two pins, one is the column and one is the row, then you figure it out from there. This assuming there is no more direct way to figure it out.
Assuming you need 20 lines to address the keyboard you are either looking at the Mega or a multiplexing solution like a pair of 74HC138 or serial-in-parallel-out shift registers to write to one side of the key matrix and then a pair of parallel-in-serial out shift registers to read the other side of the key matrix.
