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Avant keyboard programming software!

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omnigeek:
That would be cool if you could get the firmware binary file at least, and there seem to be 8051 disassemblers that could produce source code from that.  Or having the physical chip reverse-engineered should get you there too; that looked like more money than I wanted to sink into this for myself though.

Either way, then we could see if there's any possibility in the firmware for mapping keys to arbitrary scan codes, or if not then we could see about customizing the code to support it.  One thought is to have a mode where you can assign a macro to a key, but instead of defining the macro with key slot numbers, define it to send a list of scan codes... I don't know enough about the scan code sets to say how that could work, but maybe we could figure out something along those lines.

Writing new firmware from scratch wasn't something I had considered either, because I've never worked with 8051 code before and didn't want to learn it all from the ground up.  On the other hand, I was wondering if using a more modern USB-based controller would be feasible.  The problem there is being able to program it through USB, since the USB protocol only allows the keyboard to send known keystroke codes back, from what I understand.  We'd have to fit the programming protocol into that set of codes somehow, it seemed to me...

It would make an interesting project to be able to produce firmware for the Avants that we could reflash onto new, unlocked 82C59 chips; please keep me posted.  Your other alternative of mapping Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F-keys would probably be a faster route to success though...

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