geekhack Community > Keyboards
Reverse engineering a Vector Graphic 4 Key Tronic kb
ejona:
Surprised to see someone else messing with this keyboard; very few people have Vector 4 hardware. Seems we've followed parallel tracks and done similar things (like benefiting from Texelec) in the same time frame. Although I was also interested in replacing the keyboard with a modern one when using the Vector 4. Fiddling with the foam pads wouldn't have been quite so painful if there were fewer screws and if the disintegrated foam didn't produce such a dust...
Seems you've gotten to a good spot, including making yourself a schematic and all. Even though you've figured out most of this yourself already, you might still be interested in https://archive.org/details/7200-0001-vector-4-technical-information-sep-82
The keyboard communicates using normal 5V serial at 300 baud, 8 data bits, 2 stop bits, no parity (page 102/107; II 5-11/II 5-16). Page 123 (II 6-4) shows the codes sent to the computer for all key presses. Note that some of them are greater than 0x7F. Page 222 (VI A-19) has a schematic.
I wrote up some parts as I went at https://ejona.ersoft.org/archive/2021/09/25/vector-4-keyboard-adapter/ . Probably not too interesting given the point you're at.
dplass:
--- Quote from: ejona on Tue, 24 January 2023, 23:31:29 ---Surprised to see someone else messing with this keyboard; very few people have Vector 4 hardware. Seems we've followed parallel tracks and done similar things (like benefiting from Texelec) in the same time frame. Although I was also interested in replacing the keyboard with a modern one when using the Vector 4. Fiddling with the foam pads wouldn't have been quite so painful if there were fewer screws and if the disintegrated foam didn't produce such a dust...
Seems you've gotten to a good spot, including making yourself a schematic and all. Even though you've figured out most of this yourself already, you might still be interested in https://archive.org/details/7200-0001-vector-4-technical-information-sep-82
The keyboard communicates using normal 5V serial at 300 baud, 8 data bits, 2 stop bits, no parity (page 102/107; II 5-11/II 5-16). Page 123 (II 6-4) shows the codes sent to the computer for all key presses. Note that some of them are greater than 0x7F. Page 222 (VI A-19) has a schematic.
I wrote up some parts as I went at https://ejona.ersoft.org/archive/2021/09/25/vector-4-keyboard-adapter/ . Probably not too interesting given the point you're at.
--- End quote ---
Yeah I got it working 99% (the C key is annoying, and I also don't want to remove the 17 screws to re-seat the foil pad.)
Thanks for the links; though.
At this point the keyboard is a display piece rather than a DD. The F&F switches are pretty awful to type on (not to mention the flaky C key.)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version