I recently picked up a lovely Data911 keyboard. If you're not familiar with it, it's a board that was/is deployed in law enforcement cars. An interesting design, it's got a built in trackpad, doubleshot keycaps, cherry MX black switches, and a protective membrane over the switches. I plan on creating another thread on the full refurbishment & modifications once I have it complete - in the interim, I've made a mistake in the modifications and can't figure out where I've gone wrong. Perhaps I've wired something wrong, or my poor soldering skills are letting me down...
The board has a PS/2 connection, and a non-removable 1.5m pigtail cable. When I received the board, the pigtail was in very poor condition, so I came up with the brilliant (yeah right!) idea to not only change PS/2 to USB with an adapter, but cut down and splice the cables so that all the adapting took place inside the board's case, and finally end with a female USB port in the board's case, so I can use all my existing cables with it.
In short built-in PS/2 socket -> USB -> female USB mini.
A few weeks ago I successfully cut down the pigtail cable and soldered it to the USB adapter. The frankencable ended in a male USB A:
(please excuse the potato that I took these photos with)
It worked great! I connected it to the Data911 (right side), and the USB port to my computer, and got power and data.
Last night, I received a bunch of female USB sockets, desoldered the existing USB cable, soldered on new cables (for length) and soldered that to the USB port. At this point, I know I have power, because the LEDs on the board light up, but I have data. Neither the switches nor trackpad provide any input, and the board doesn't show up as connected to my computer.
How I have it wired: black is ground, red is VCC, green is DP/D+, orange is DN/D-
On the female USB mini socket, I'm not certain how to number these, since conventions seem to differ. There are 2 pins on the top, 3 pins on the bottom. I have orange(D-) wired to the top right pin, red(vcc), green (D-), black(gnd) on the bottom pins.
I'm hoping someone far more clever than I can tell me where I've gone wrong...
