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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: strum4h on Sun, 10 April 2011, 09:56:24

Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: strum4h on Sun, 10 April 2011, 09:56:24: Thats good to know. I want to switch mine around now lol.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: kaiserreich on Sun, 10 April 2011, 10:51:41: Funny, I used to have BSODs in my WinXP when I plug the mouse into the purple port and the keyboard into the green port

Currently there are motherboards with half purple/half green ports, so those surely will be compatible
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: canon.tk on Sun, 10 April 2011, 10:55:54: Yeah they're the same. The color coding is for people that don't know the keyboard PS/2 port is the bottom one (closest to the motherboard).
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: vun on Sun, 10 April 2011, 10:56:03: What about this?
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Ekaros on Sun, 10 April 2011, 11:07:15: Hmm, do I have to test:
PS/2->USB->PS/2 ;D

Got an PS/2->USB adaptor with 6G ;D

Still, what did you expect?
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: kaiserreich on Sun, 10 April 2011, 11:07:42: Quote from: ripster;327920
You need to look at the picture again.

whoooppss
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: The Solutor on Sun, 10 April 2011, 11:16:25: Quote from: ripster;327867

So I drag out the multimeter and sure enough it's the same electrically (I'll post pinouts here in a bit).

The pin 2 and 6 of the PS/2 connector are usually "reserved" (unused) so you have to connect 4 usb pins with 4 ps/2 pins and there is just one way to do this.

The only variation is related to the notebooks which shares mouse and keyboard input on a single ps2 port: if you want to connect both mouse and kb you need a special Y adapter that uses the 2 normally unused ps2 pins.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Lpb45 on Sun, 10 April 2011, 12:30:48: how about a grey one?
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Lpb45 on Sun, 10 April 2011, 12:54:46: hold on lemme break out my polaroid
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Vittra on Sun, 10 April 2011, 16:02:37: Quote from: ripster;327940
I WAS going to test my Asus P8P67 to see if autorecognized mice versus keyboard but then....

I got bored with PS/2 long ago. USB 3.0 (Blue) is the future.
Show Image
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5173/5441835641_81fba6472a_z.jpg)

Dunno. Intel seems reluctant to adopt USB3 on their own chipsets. They seem to want to push Lightpeak (Thunderbolt) instead.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: kektr0city on Sun, 10 April 2011, 20:59:09: Quote from: ripster;328189
Hahaha - you MUST be kidding me. USB 3.0 will be there in next round of chipsets (just like USB 2.0). Lightpeak was done to keep Steve Jobs happy and will be dropped as soon as he dies.

kinda like firewire and minidvi? those formats are so garbage it's actually funny to me that they adopted them on mac's in an attempt to create a new standard.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: False_Dmitry_II on Sun, 10 April 2011, 22:12:01: I would have assumed that these were the same to begin with. I don't actually have any purple ones, but plenty of green ones.

Speaking of adapters, I've just gotten an active one from fry's. It's the one by iogear. It was on sale for $5. How okay is it? I'm typing... through it right now on a model M. It seems to work okay as far as I can tell. The only thing that seems strange to me at the moment is that in aquakeytest, as soon as you press a keyset that fails its 2KRO, it seems to send a release signal for everything that was being pressed. Instead of what would normally happen, the first few keys staying dark and then it simply blocking anything else, everything goes back to the unpressed color. Is that normal for these adapters?
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: KrinkleStyle on Sun, 10 April 2011, 22:28:27: Because its a PS2 to USB adapter regardless of the pictures and colors they decide to make them. It was just a system put in place to make sure people plugged their devices into the correct PS/2 port.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: False_Dmitry_II on Sun, 10 April 2011, 22:35:36: I actually did assume it. Not in the tense I put it in. Once I realized/found out that they were passive adapters that means that all the switching of protocols is done in the controller of the object being used. For all of my devices so far, that would be a terrible optical mouse of some kind over the years which is why I have so many green thingys everywhere.

In fact, I never had any reason to think that they wouldn't be the same. Now that I'm actively thinking about it I'm reminded of a trick where people would want computers (IIRC servers of some kind) to boot without a keyboard because they were unneeded in that case. There was no BIOS option for 'no keyboard error off' or whatever, so some guy just stuck in a green USB to PS/2 thing, and they booted without triggering the error, so it was registering that something was there. Although I didn't think of this until just now, but it's possible that it was adding itself to other things subconsciously.

So with them just being passive basically shape plugs so the wires get to and can fit in the correct places, there is no adapting going on at all. It would be incredibly stupid, and in fact more difficult, to make them anything but the same thing. It was mentioned somewhere that there are some current USB keyboards that have on their controller the ability to go PS/2 but they don't include purple shape plugs. When I read this my very first thought was that I couldn't care less if they did, because I have 5+ green ones and I'd just use one of those if I got such a keyboard. No pondering or thinking about it at the time, just a surety that it would work. I didn't find the idea strange at all.

Then again, I have been accused of clairvoyance/ESP in the past...

So what about my active adapter? The wiki more or less just talks about the blue cube and that one belkin adapter that shares the same chipset.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: KrinkleStyle on Sun, 10 April 2011, 22:47:14: Quote from: ripster;328308
Correct Answer!!! Thank Intel/Microsoft and PC97 for that. Probably Dell did all the work though.

Yet another reason why USB mo bettah.

Adding a link to this and description of what a passive adapter is to the Dongle wiki sometime.

At least no one listened to Logitech. Orange PS/2 connectors...that's just crazy!

PS/2 has been a legacy port for like 10 years now. I look forward to the day USB completes its total domination of PC peripherals.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: BlacK.OuT on Sun, 10 April 2011, 23:16:55: Quote from: KrinkleStyle;328319
At least no one listened to Logitech. Orange PS/2 connectors...that's just crazy!

PS/2 has been a legacy port for like 10 years now. I look forward to the day USB completes its total domination of PC peripherals.

The keyboard I was using before this Leopold had an orange PS/2 adaptor. Also, the mobo on my computer only has one ps/2 slot...half of it's green, half is purple. Same damn thing guys...same damn thing.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Hak Foo on Mon, 11 April 2011, 00:08:53: Asus M3A78= 1 blue port only. So you can keep the M, but must lose the 40 cent ball rodent.

The top and bottom to identify the correct port logic won't work 100% - some boards have them side-by-side (ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 for example). I think early PS/2s had them horizontal too.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: alaricljs on Mon, 11 April 2011, 08:15:39: Quote from: ripster;328337
The red USB ports on my Asus P8P67 also puzzled me for a while. They are just regular USB ports. The P67 chipset supports 12 USB 2.0 ports. Bottom red is ESata.[/IMG]

Think they got lazy with the plastic molding and decided to use only the red plastic... but then why is the next cluster over 1 green and 3 black? Pretty odd.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: Vittra on Mon, 11 April 2011, 09:09:30: Quote from: ripster;328189
Hahaha - you MUST be kidding me. USB 3.0 will be there in next round of chipsets (just like USB 2.0). Lightpeak was done to keep Steve Jobs happy and will be dropped as soon as he dies.

It won't be native on X79/Socket 2011, so you aren't seeing it until Ivybridge.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: daerid on Mon, 11 April 2011, 10:18:33: Quote from: kektr0city;328245
kinda like firewire and minidvi? those formats are so garbage it's actually funny to me that they adopted them on mac's in an attempt to create a new standard.

In my personal experience, FW is much more reliable than USB (1 or 2). But then again, I work primarily in the music production business. However, USB 3 will probably supplant it for sure
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: False_Dmitry_II on Mon, 11 April 2011, 12:52:07: I dunno, I can see the use of esata. I wouldn't really want a permanent hard drive that just happens to be on the outside of the computer using usb.

Even my motherboard has some of the USB ports colored differently just because. Now that they're using it to tell a difference in what it can do, I guess they'll have to stop using any other colors. Or at least they should.
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: The Solutor on Mon, 11 April 2011, 12:58:33: Quote from: ripster;328664

USB 3.0 Rulez! (I'm still looking for something good to plug into it)

(http://fastcache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2008/04/zipziplego.jpg)
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: JBert on Mon, 11 April 2011, 17:17:39: Quote from: vun;327924
What about this?

Woah, tell OCN about that, they'll love the low-latency data transfers!
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: sspence65 on Fri, 20 January 2012, 15:23:21: I am attempting to connect a keyboard and mouse to a arduino. I figured I could use the picture at the beginning of this thread to go striaght from a usb key / mouse to the arduino without the intermediate ps/2 connector, but pretend it's still ps/2 logically. The arduino can't be a usb host in this application.

I can't post the url to the project, as it's being denied, but it's at practicalarduino dot com / projects / ps2-keyboard-or-mouse

Thoughts or comments?
Title: TIL (Today I Learned) That Green Dongles And Purple Dongles Are The Same
Post by: HairyTroll on Fri, 20 January 2012, 15:30:41: Quote from: The Solutor;327933
The only variation is related to the notebooks which shares mouse and keyboard input on a single ps2 port: if you want to connect both mouse and kb you need a special Y adapter that uses the 2 normally unused ps2 pins.

The Amiga CD32 uses these two pins for serial communication in the AUX port, to allow keyboard/RS-232 in the same connector.