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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: journeymangeek on Fri, 27 May 2011, 20:43:37

Title: What interface do old sun keyboard use
Post by: journeymangeek on Fri, 27 May 2011, 20:43:37

For some reason i have the keyboard off a sun ultra 5 (the rest of it got left behind in a move, on account of it not working, and not being worth shipping home), and it uses an odd interface - a round plug, 3 pins on the first row, 3 pins with a space before the rightmost pin on the second and 2 more pins on the last row. It also has the option to daisy chain the mouse off the keyboard - the plug end looks eerily like a S-VHS port

Is this a reconfigured PS/2 or some crazy custom interface?

Title: What interface do old sun keyboard use
Post by: DaemonRaccoon on Fri, 27 May 2011, 20:48:25

It's a custom interface, See here (http://www.kbdbabel.org/) on how to build an adapter, it's the Sun 4/5/6 interface.

Title: What interface do old sun keyboard use
Post by: theferenc on Fri, 27 May 2011, 21:34:34

It's pretty custom, yes. What's even weirder is that for a while on their Ultra 5s, they were using a physically identical plug to PS/2, but totally different signaling and power lines. It was really annoying.

Adapters do exist for sale, or at least they used to (in the late 90s I had a few) but as DaemonRaccoon posted, you can just build your own. It isn't that hard. We did that a few times as well.

Title: What interface do old sun keyboard use
Post by: quadibloc on Fri, 27 May 2011, 21:42:42

I got the document from the Sun site that explains the interface. It is unusual in that it's more like a conventional serial interface than that of most keyboards. Ordinary keyboards are bit-serial as well, but they're very different from RS-232.

Title: What interface do old sun keyboard use
Post by: kps on Mon, 30 May 2011, 09:23:04

Quote from: journeymangeek;352252

Is this a reconfigured PS/2 or some crazy custom interface?

 
>Implying PS/2 isn't a crazy custom interface.