I have been busy with hacking Hunchentoot and flexi-streams at daytime during the last few weeks, and wrote a thread-safe version of a simple deterministic profiler for Clozure CL so that I could isolate performance problems. I'm going to blog about that stuff in a few days, but as that is daytime work, I had to find something else to relax on the weekend.
Thus, I turned my attention to the kbdbabel hardware that I received last week. A few months ago, I emailed Alexander Kurz, who is the creator of the kbdbabel project, whether he could help me getting a PS/2 adapter for the Symbolics keyboard to work. At the time, he had created PS/2 adapters for various vintage keyboards and he expressed his interest. We could not make much progress, though, as he did not have a keyboard and I lacked the knowledge to adopt the 8051 based assembler code to the needs of the Symbolics protocol. I'm mostly an AVR guy when it comes to microcontrollers.
Alexander was intimidated enough by the pictures of the various Symbolics keyboards that he decided to get one and make a kbdbabel for it. I was more than happy when he contacted me out of the blue a few weeks ago and told me that he now has a solution.
The hardware he sent did not work right away with my Thinkpad, but that was because the Thinkpad's PS/2 port do not quite work like most other PS/2 ports do. Thus, I had to get a PS/2 to USB adapter for 10 Euros. With that, the adapter worked as advertised.
I had to complete the keyboard mapping so that all keys in the default Open Genera map are mapped to a key on the Symbolics keyboard. This means that there are no mappings for several keys (the square, circle and star keys among them). Supporting those keys will require changing the Open Genera X11 keyboard mapping code, which is something I'll put onto my "weekend projects" list now.
I have not yet tested the adapter with the "slim" keyboard - I only have a 3600 one right now and the two "slim" keyboards I bought from David K. Schmidt are still in Cambridge and won't be with me until next month. Contrasted to the 3600 keyboard, the "slim" keyboard is microcontroller based and will most likely require different timing than the TTL based old-style keyboard. Other than that, the keyboards should be compatible and the adapter should work with both variants. I'm going to build a few adapters for myself and some friends of mine. If you want one as well and don't like to do the soldering yourself, contact me.
I had to complete the keyboard mapping so that all keys in the default Open Genera map are mapped to a key on the Symbolics keyboard. This means that there are no mappings for several keys (the square, circle and star keys among them). Supporting those keys will require changing the Open Genera X11 keyboard mapping code, which is something I'll put onto my "weekend projects" list now.
I have not yet tested the adapter with the "slim" keyboard - I only have a 3600 one right now and the two "slim" keyboards I bought from David K. Schmidt are still in Cambridge and won't be with me until next month. Contrasted to the 3600 keyboard, the "slim" keyboard is microcontroller based and will most likely require different timing than the TTL based old-style keyboard. Other than that, the keyboards should be compatible and the adapter should work with both variants. I'm going to build a few adapters for myself and some friends of mine. If you want one as well and don't like to do the soldering yourself, contact me.