Marcel van KervinckThere are several methods brewing for hooking up a keyboard. The one most in line with the system is WattSekunde's four chip design for a matrix keyboard interface. But such keyboards might be hard to find, while PS/2 keyboards are still easy to get. But their protocol is convoluted and it is unclear how to handle that with a few simple logic chips. So... we cheat!
PS/2 is simply too modern, and we need a time machine to translate its fast and complex signals to the simple signals that the Gigatron will understand. The ATtiny85 will be our Babel fish.
To get some idea: the ATtiny85 must be configured to run at 8 MHz to do its magic. 1 MHz won't be good enough to catch and transfer simple key strokes. Here is the system in action:
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Very neat and compact! But if you're going to cheat by using a micro, then you might as well bring it up to the modern keyboard standard USB. I believe you can do it with a single micro as well, but maybe not as elegant as the 8-pin ATtiny. This is probably why so many early computers had their keyboards built-in (maybe in the Gigatron 2?)
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That was the previous phase, but it used an Arduino Uno and that has two micro controllers, one for the USB. Next step is to remove the PS/2 guts from the keyboard and drive the matrix from TTL :-)
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