Pre-built Soarer Converters for 122-key Model F's

[1391406]

Saw these and thought they looked great. Of course it's cheaper to build your own, but if you don't care then these are a great option, not to mention they come with housing.

[nubbinator]

Yeah, there was a thread about them earlier on here.  I forget which sub though.

[fohat.digs]

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=64670.0

[ed_avis]

I have bought one of these and it works with my F122.  (It doesn't work with another F122 I have lying around but that could be because the keyboard was at the bottom of a pile of heavy keyboards for a year or so and got damaged.)

[berserkfan]

I have bought one of these and it works with my F122.  (It doesn't work with another F122 I have lying around but that could be because the keyboard was at the bottom of a pile of heavy keyboards for a year or so and got damaged.)

F122 and damaged usually don't go in the same sentence especially if the damage is done by other keyboards. What other keyboards are so lethal? A bunch of 10 pound beam springs?

[1391406]

I have bought one of these and it works with my F122.  (It doesn't work with another F122 I have lying around but that could be because the keyboard was at the bottom of a pile of heavy keyboards for a year or so and got damaged.)

Does your converter have a reset button(a la Teensy)?

[ed_avis]

The converter has no reset button.  Although it runs the vanilla Soarer code, and so accepts key remapping commands, it cannot be reprogrammed with newer firmware.  The seller confirmed this:

Interestingly enough, firmware upgrading is the one thing that I am pretty sure that these adapters CAN NOT DO compared to a regular teensy. Basically, Soarer's code was written for the teensy bootloader, and these are based on a different 32u4 Arduino (so that I could shrink down the size of the circuit board) and for some reason they just don't seem to respond to the "boot" command (which would let it enter boot mode and accept different firmware).

[ed_avis]

Hmm I think you are right - the F122 seems fine.  It was underneath a pile of Ms, a Model F AT and a couple of Toughbook tablet PCs... nothing it couldn't handle.  I was just trying to hotplug the keyboard, but a limitation of Soarer's converter with the Fs is that you have to plug the keyboard into the converter first, then the converter into the PC.  Otherwise you get repeat keypresses and other weirdness.

[fohat.digs]

Also remember that if it is like the Teensy, the computer will only recognize one Teensy at a time, the first one it saw.

I always unplug the converter and reboot if I am going to test something different.

[orihalcon]

I mentioned this to Hasu, and he thinks that the reason that the "Boot" command in Soarer's code doesn't work is because it is written specifically for the Teensy bootloader, and basically the "boot" command tells the board to jump to a the bootloader address which is a bit different on these chips. Should be fairly easy thing to fix in Soarer's code, but we'd need an update to Soarer's code to do that.  I've offered to commission that feature, but like many others, haven't heard back from him recently. Assuming that feature were to be added, then they would be upgradeable from then on. 

Other thing Hasu mentioned was that it might be possible to interface with the bootloader itself to get it to do a reset through Arduinio programming software, and if that were possible, then they would all be upgradable.  I don't have any Arduino programming experience or know what to try though to see if this is a possibility.