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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: compu_85 on Tue, 08 September 2020, 14:35:48
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I was perusing Craigslist, and spotted an NEC Spinwriter printing terminal, basically a more modern teletype. After some cleaning and oiling, it works great!
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When I typed on it the first time, I was surprised how nice the keyboard was. No wonder... it has a Honeywell / Microswitch SD hall effect keyboard!
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Converting the ASCII interface to USB was a nice Sunday project. The keys on the left have dedicated wires on the connector, and don't generate strobe pulses. I set up Break as a modifier to give curly braces with the bracket keys, page up / down with the line feed key, and mac cmd+space for the Escape key. Local turns the clicker on / off. Auto Linefeed changes the number pad into a T nav, with 5 being up. Local, Uppercase, and Auto Linefeed are all latching, as it the caps lock key.
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Most of the keycaps with white plastic have yellowed. They did this on the underside too, so it doesn't seem like just UV exposure.
A friend suggested using straight OxyClean to whiten the plastic. After some tests to be sure it wouldn't damage the gray plastic, I got this result after ~2 hours of sun time:
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I've put the keyboard back in the terminal for now. The terminal works perfectly, it's kind of a hoot to get on IRC on a printer.
Thanks!
-Jason
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That's so cool, I wish I knew how to convert something ~