I am writing this message on a Stowaway keyboard, running through my desktop's serial port... The cable is connected as follows... if the keyboard is oriented as if you were typing on it, let pin 1 be on the far left. Keyboard pin | Serial Port Pin --------------------------------- 2 | DTR 3 | RD 4 | RTS 7 | GND 10 | GND -------------------------------- All the other pins are unconnected, although I noticed that pin 5 is connected inside the keyboard, and I suspect maybe it allows one to change the scan code set? While I'm reading from the keyboard, DTR is high; pin 2 is the keyboard's power input. And whenever I start up the application I use to read from the keyboard, I drop RTS low for a few hundred milliseconds, then raise it again. This is, for some reason, a required initialization procedure. And, for the record, the keyboard is happy at RS-232 voltages, even though the Palm only gives it 3.3 . And I run at 9600 bps. It generates one byte for each keypress, and two bytes for each key release. To avoid tediously mapping the keys to PC virtual keys manually, I wrote a little code to capture a key from the serial port, then capture a key from the real keyboard and log the pair to file. So all I had to do was hit each key on the Palm keyboard, then the corresponding key on the "real" keyboard, and the mapping was saved to file for me. The application I wrote, the source, and the required .ini file (the key mappings) are in the directory : http://techhouse.org/dmorris/th/palmkbd I hope that's amusing for those interested in the keyboard... -Dan Dan Morris http://techhouse.org/dmorris Tiqit Computers http://www.tiqit.com -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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