geekhack
geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: Kristopher Micinski on Sat, 10 March 2012, 13:35:38
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All,
I have a number of keyboards that do this, and I was hoping that some of you can enlighten me. I regularly (as I assume many of you do) remap CapsLock and Cntrl for better emacs usage. This works great, and since I started doing it years ago, I've grown accustomed to it and could never switch back! However, on my older keyboards (my Model M and Kinesis do this) I notice a strange problem: when I hold down caps lock for a while, tap a key, and then go back to tap another key, caps lock will have become unpressed. This is probably behavior in hardware, because my modern mechanical keyboards don't do this, and I can see some rationale for it.. This is super annoying, however, when I use emacs for a while, hover over some code wondering what to do, and then want to continue on; I have to lift my finger off CapsLock and push it again, resulting in frequent error. I googled around to see what this is, and I also tried searching this forum, but I can't think of a name for this behavior (maybe it's standard..). Does anyone know what this is, and what causes it? (I assume it's something that I can't fix without different firmware, but whatever, I'm just interested as to why it's like this..)
Kris
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My guess is it's because the keyboards don't have nkeyrollover
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Well, he said HOLD caps AND tap another key, but that should be fine with any keys on a Model M.
Kris, are you using a PS/2 - USB adapter with the older 'boards?
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Ah, yes I am! How silly of me not to have recognized that this could have been the issue :-/
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Right. A little quick reading reveals that this is most probably the fact that I've been using a dumb ps2 to usb adapter, rather a proper converter which actually interprets and changes the signal. I've ordered a more proper converter and it should be coming in the mail soon enough! Thanks for pointing me at the likely cause!
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Well, it must've been not entirely dumb, for it to work at all! But, yeah, some are definately better than others, and the Model M is quite fussy about which it wants to work well with.
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We've tried to catalog (http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=PS2-to-USB+adapters) them, but some makers change the insides from time to time, so it's hard to keep track.
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That's right, mine was the second one down on the list, which has the noted issue:
- Protocol issue; when holding down a key, then hitting another key, the first key is no longer sent
I'm suspecting that exactly this was causing the problem, I guess both of the adapters I've used have been these :-/
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Right, that's pretty suspicious :-)
I gave up on them and wrote my own (http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:17458) (I wanted to be able to adapt some less mainstream keyboards), but still, there's one or two standard-looking PS/2 keyboards it can't handle.
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Blue Cube solves the world's problems.
Nothing does that! It does work well with a Model M though. If you can find one.