 So the other day I took apart a old Casio electric typewriter and Mentioned that I wanted to turn the keyboard into a USB keyboard for a PC But that I needed some kind of adapter to attach the microcontroller board to the keyboard itself But then having another look at it. I realized that there's only like 30 connections I could build an adapter, but it would be so much faster and easier just like solder the wires on So let's give that a try. This will also give me the opportunity to try out my new toy This moderately dubious solder sucker for desoldering Which I haven't used yet So it's I can smell it beginning to heat up. It'll probably burn off paint in a Hideously smelly way, but we'll see whether it works And you know whether it electrocutes me So I'm going to take the LCD board off because that's not participating in this It just unplugged so with a bit of difficulty There we go And here you can see the top well the bottom really of the connector Which normally connects the thing or to the typewriter's main board and I want to remove this so I could solder on some wires so Let's give the solder sucker a try. It's essentially a hollow soldering iron with a piston attachment so Untangle the wire So what we do is we hold it on a joint Melt the joint and push the button Did anything actually happen That did actually get some of the solder off Let's go around and do the others The professional ones or at least the less unprofessional ones Have a powered sucker So you just stick the thing on and it sucks all the solder out into a reservoir Has that done anything? That is actually removing the solder reasonably well Which is awesome So hopefully I do the rest And then it just comes off. I think this cost me about three francs With all the electrical safety there's some that apply With all the electrical safety That price tag implies And yes, I did check that it works for 240 volts so there's 30 connections Too often are for power These two fat tracks on the side The power is used but to drive both the keyboard itself Which is just a simple switching device and so doesn't use much And is also rooted to the lcd unit And I'm going to assume that the thing's running off five volts because everything does At least everything from this era does No, that's a heart Just wonder if we're melting the connector yet Not much The camera is still running and is still hopefully focused The soldering iron seems good and hot, which is nice If it turns out that the thing doesn't run off five volts The only thing I can actually damage is the lcd controller And it'd be nice to have that This thing's going to be plugged into usb So I can either use a custom protocol to draw stuff on the screen Or just turn it into a tty Tty. I mean serial port Sorry, I'm more focused on not Setting fire to myself Than talking coherently Now I haven't seen any solder come out of this thing yet So I wonder where it's all going It did come With this Which I assume is for cleaning the muzzle, so intriguing Well, I have sucked most of the solder from this thing. So is it actually Not actually loose enough to come off It's not bad I think there's a bit of encouragement that will just come out There's a blob of solder on that pin there. So let's just remove that All right, that's actually coming out Some of the joints need a bit of encouragement I think it's actually still this one on the end. So let's get that on another go Yeah One of the pins Somewhere Isn't quite making it through the hole. It could be this one Most of them have come out cleanly, which is great. I loathe de-soldering. This is my least favorite job So the fact that this is actually making it easier Let's apply a little bit of bruce force and ignorance Ah, that's interesting That's the pins on the other side of the problem a little bit bent But easy enough to bend back again. I'm not going to use this connector again But Worth having If I So this is the ribbon connector that it actually works in This is actually still good enough To use Should I ever need to get 30 wires from one PCB to another? With this terrible staggered Pin spacing, which is extremely unfriendly to 0.1 inch components So I was thinking that for the wire I was going to use this piece of scrap a ribbon cable From a Scuzzy enclosure This is in fact the one I built the flux engine for The flux engine out of sorry now It's kind of a shame to lose the connectors at the end, but I don't really think I'm going to use usb again And they appear to be riveted together. So Are they riveted? No, they're not riveted So I can just unclip these or you know break the clips that works just as well and this Please should just Come off Oh, there's another latch right these Yeah, these the connectors the clips I've just broken are used for attaching another piece of the idc connector the actual Clip here also breaks I suspect this is very old and the plastic is brittle And let's just snap the other one off as well So I can unplug this So idc connector The way it works is you place your ribbon cable in the connector Clamp it on with this thing And these little blades push through the ribbon cable And make electrical contact It's great They're actually really easy to use But let's trim off the end of the cable relatively straight Now the great thing about this ribbon cable is that it is half of 0.1 inch pitch So it actually lines up very nicely With our staggered 0.1 inch pitch holes So I need one two three four five six 30 I need 30 wires So 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Tear it here And just check that we have enough wires So yes, and let's just remove some cable Vital piece of electronics equipment A good pair of kitchen scissors This can go back into the junk drawer This is going to be the cable that connects to the PCB And this very importantly is going to be the cable I'm going to practice wire on Because I'm going to have to strip 60 ends I'm going to try and use my wire stripper here to see if it works. So Wow That worked It's not very good, but it worked try the other side So it didn't go in quite straight Let's try a bit more care The gripper that holds the wire Doesn't grip very well So I kind of have to put my finger on it to make it work. Yeah, it's working. It's not so great, but it's working Right, but you can only strip Some at a time, so I'm going to actually need to batch it So how many is this done? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 The other side Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Yeah, okay All right, so let's split this up Into three lots of 10 One, two, three, four, eight, nine, 10 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 And actually before I go any further Turn off this soldering iron on the other one So that was slightly more exciting than I was hoping Turns out I don't have anywhere to put a red hot soldering iron other than the soldering iron stand Which needs to contain my other soldering iron So I just ended up wandering around the house. I found somewhere to put it to rip these Possibly 10 was a bit. Yeah, 10 was indeed over optimistic I can't do 10 reliably So let's split this up a bit more Now I'm eventually going to have to divide these up into Staggered odd and even pairs to go into the holes here So I don't actually mind Splitting wires I'm looking for about three to four millimeters of bare wire Possibly a little bit more than that The other end of this wire is going to be worse I'll show you why when I get there This wire stripper is great when it works when it works more than I wanted, but that's fine It all needs to be relatively even From as most the wire is getting in the way of itself Hmm Quite a lot in the way of itself Yeah, this bit's exciting And the last bit Rather more than I wanted This one needs trimming back a little that there will be plenty of slack It doesn't need to be precise I mean, here's all the bodge Okay, so Now I need to split these up Into single strands Which is slow and laborious and always as Uglier sin and you need good fingernails for it and result will not be pretty But it should work Once this is done, I will end up tuning Twisting and tinning each of these individual ends all 30 of them and then we get to insert it into the board and sold them on Which is actually the easy bit I have yet to decide whether Pin one or pin two is five volts I'm going to wire this thing up. So the red stripe is on pin one This ribbon cable has got the red stripe at one ends, you know, which side is which However, I then can't solder it up to the microcontroller until I figured this out The Most of the keyboard won't care as it's just like a switch But there is a An AND gate on the board Which will care And of course the the lcd module will very much care It's this big fat controller So it's important I get that right They will be soldered to The ground and five volt pads on the microcontroller I could just solder all the wires to gpi opens And then figure out which one to set to zero and which one to set to five volts in software Because this particular microcontroller will let you do that But I'm not entirely certain whether the uh the microcontrollers gpi opens can provide enough power to run the lcd Okay Twist do it all again on the other end. You know what I'm going to solder these and I'm going to tin these now To hold to hold them together because some of them are already beginning to untwist Actually thinking about it. I do hope this cable is old enough to be copper Because they did make some of these cables from aluminium and that's the right pain because aluminium won't solder So good that's in that that's copper It's plated, which is why it's silvery Hmm, that's tin very badly Solders just not sticking Yeah, also, let's not do a soldering on top of the keyboard because you know If that had fallen on the tracks, it would have been a pain to get off Yeah, I'm sorry. I have to hold this Sufficiently close to my face so I can see what I'm doing that. I bet the camera is Not focusing The checkerboard cutting mat is really great at giving the camera a focus target Even when you don't want it to and most of this solder is actually being wasted It's not sticking to the Other wires, but I need it Because of the flux in the wires I wonder whether I should get out my big pot of flux and start dipping Let's try that for this one Yeah, these wires are not brilliant You're not really supposed to to solder these things So I might have actually been better off with just segments from the spool of wire The ribbon cable does make it easier to Track which wire goes where I don't think that's going to help Yeah, unfortunately the wire is springy and my ability to twist it Not brilliant And it just untwists it's on its own accord We are over halfway through halfway through this end I'm getting to get less Convinced that this is sustainable Now the reason why I'm why I took the connector off in favor of the ribbon cable Is because the wires have to go into both sides of this board And The ribbon connector is essentially unmanageable. It's It's a flex PCB coated with copper and you can't solder it You could the only thing you can do with those is friction fit them Into the appropriate connector And as half the holes will have to go into one side and the other half and the other You're just not going to get connectors to do that Now I was on I'm also wondering because the original plan was to solder this end onto the keyboard PCB And then work on the other end with it anchored But this is so Fiddly and annoying that I'm wondering whether that's a good idea Whether I should try and prepare both ends of the cable first Before soldering anything The other thing of course is maybe I don't need to solder it Maybe I don't need to tin it at all if I just Straighten the wires Now I should go through the hole anyway, and I can just solder the top without needing to um Treat them the holes in this are a bit smaller Yeah, that doesn't want to go in They got a stray strand I'm going to have to tin them do it the hard way And add a tiny Just four more to go Well 34 more to go really This is the kind of thing solder pots useful for I've never used one. I don't really want one either The solder pot is instead of a soldering iron It's a sort of heated cauldron full of bubbling solder Or rather not bubbling you're supposed to get it that hot And in a situation like this you just dip the ends of your wires in you're done Of course the great thing about solder pots Is that if you spill them you can do yourself enormous amounts of damage Which is why I don't want one Okay, those are now all Tinned with various degrees of Eptitude So I'm not going to solder this down But we want pin one to be on this side So One goes oh dear this is going to be dreadful They're going to go in like this And yes they do go through Yeah, that's going to be a right pain to put in Once I've soldered a few down the rest will be locked in place, which is nice I'm going to have to do the other end Okay, so The way this is going to work Is that these 30 wires will get split alternately into 15 odd and 15 even And these will then go Here So in fact they're going to splay out quite a lot I'm wondering how much wire I wanted to leave I think quite a lot. This is going to be wasteful So This thing come off So I'm going to mount this thing in the box With the lcd controller here The top of the box is going to be made out of the top shell of the typewriter Sawn off here The back Is going to have the usb controller in it So the wire Which is going to come out About here Is going to need to fold up So very much depends how much wire I Have So if I mount the thing like this Then I need to chop off quite a lot of wire But I also need quite a lot of surplus wire To account for the splay I can always make the wires shorter but not longer. So And the other thing I need to do is to Go through the pins on the board and figure out the dedicated ones. So in fact, I will go and do that now Okay, that's done. I've blacked out the pins. I don't want to use The ones on the bottom have capacitors attached to them And these two at the top are for programming the device And these two here this one is wired up to the switch Which is normally useful and this one is wired up to the led which is also normally useful Right the other thing I did was I looked up the pin out of this nand gate And I determined that pin seven is ground So we mark this In dark just being ground a bit more dark on So that means that one We'll connect to one of these pins over here either two or one Always test your multimeter beeper before you use it two 14 is Positive it's actually one That's correct. Awesome All right, so that pin two is ground Mark this one as well And that's nice Because we were going to wire up the red striped pin ones and red means live So How am I going to do this? so Two of these wires will be Siphoned off and go on here. They're even in the right order The others will need to be turned into odds and evens I am going to solder this down onto the PCB now Because I think that every single wire is going to have to be routed distinctly So let us start with Pins one and two So Just a little bit of dead solder. I'm just going to tack this down To give let me free up my hand to solder the other one on Now re-solder this joint decent joints No, the next question is do I want to do the other end now? Would I want to work along to work along at least for the time being? Oh, this is fiddly Still faster than making a board I had some tweezers here a moment ago. Yeah So does that actually work? I think so I think that's a good joint. I don't think that's a good joint at all So I think that There's a blob of solder and I can't see the wire through it. So I think what that's actually done Yeah Is it's Covered the wire without making electrical contact. It's not so great either It's better Yeah Because I can see here that the wire is actually pulled out If I put a little bit of pressure on this side of the wire Hopefully without burning myself apply a little bit of solder to this side Does that push in any further? No Okay Right, he's actually making electrical contacts. I won't fiddle with it. So one two three four five six Seven goes in here The solder sucker has left the Holes nice and clean, which is good. I was worried that I'd end up with Films of solder across the holes. That's preventing me from pushing wires in But it hasn't so I think that was worth every penny of the three francs I spent on it Might have been a bit more Might have been as much as five try to Try to bend the Wire to give a little bit of pressure Because that helps the wires actually project through the holes That's allowing the solder access the top of them Yeah, they look good I have seen this kind of soldering done In commercial products and I do wonder how it was done Whether they had like rows of automated humans doing this Or whether you can do it by machine. I really hope you can do it by machine That one Did I push? Oh, yeah. Okay only four Oops, that's a bridge The thump was me banging my elbow on the table holding the thing to jolt it To break loose a Any blob of solder on the on the board Old trick surprisingly effective Okay That's not right. I think that's this one Yeah, the wire hadn't gone all the way down through the book through the board So there was a bit sticking up. Yeah, I really need one hand to hold the To hold the wires against the board one hand to hold the solder and one hand To hold the soldering iron, but it did manage to tack the wires down Hey, this is very tedious That is not a good joint I need more solder now I traced some of the board earlier And I know that the pins down this end drive the LCD and the pins up this end are mostly the Keyboard matrix. Thankfully the microcontroller doesn't care Its pins are almost completely remappable It does have a built-in i2c SPI controller Which likes a particular set of pins But frankly I'm not going to be using it. I'm going to build my own Well, I'm going to be using a standard component that builds its own in verilog And that can be attached to any arbitrary pin So I don't care what they're attached to I probably wouldn't be doing this if I needed to do A more accurate pin mapping A pin assignment rather Because that stuff's no fun. That's the thing I like about these boards What I don't like These are retaining What I don't like about these boards is they're relatively pricey these cost these Costs ten dollars each Plus shipping which is pricey And the tooling is all incredibly proprietary I mean, it's good It's one of the few things that actually persuades me to boot into windows It's uh all in one environment where you can Draw the circuit that goes on to the soft logic fpga part of the device And then it generates all the c code For the code part of the device No tedious setup required You're just design your circuit Write a few lines of c code that actually like Stitch your components together And it works Okay, there's a blob of solder on that wire and it's not going through the hole So since I've got these two wires in let's solder them into place while I fiddle with it Again, I'm going to need to tack them down That was not clever Yeah, I managed I very slightly burnt myself which managed to but the reflex managed to pull the wire out of the hole It didn't even manage to stick the wire down Excuse my ergonomics That one's stuck down So I'll put this one down properly Put this one back down properly I hope Nope, I didn't go in I actually think now I would have been much better off going with ordinary single lengths of wire The lamp on it It's not working Because the tip of the wire is tinned. It's slightly stiff, but it's not stiff enough to push through the hole Shape the end so it'll actually go through and the next one I'm going to need a bit of bit of force to actually stick them down Let's see if I can do this without Burning myself this time And really burn myself. It's just a shock Hopefully too Okay, well 5678 Okay, four more pairs to go and luckily the number of holes matches the number of wires Which is always good to see when you're doing something like this. That's the wrong wire I've got this one So the last thing I want to do is to have to do this again Some of these wires Out of the way Two three is that going in that's going in four Okay, this is again ergonomically exciting And not going to show up on the camera very well. Also, I keep banging my head on the microphone I wonder what that sounds like So I have to keep my thumb on the back of the wires to keep them stuck in Stuck down Okay I managed to get Two wires very nearly stuck together Yep, not quite Okay, I believe the camera may have lost some footage there I think it reached the end of its 30 minute filming cycle and stopped It's really annoying apparently it's due to tax reasons So with with luck you missed me bodge some of the worst joints have ever done Okay They're going to stay in place unsupervised Probably not but that'll do To raise it in the wires up a bit Yes, they are going to stay just nice I think I can do this properly Okay Yikes that one pulled out Luckily just a very slight touch of heat makes it go in My soldering iron is got lots of heating ability And these are very small tracks Okay, I think that's possibly done Let me just have a quick Here close up some of the joints Yeah, I'm seriously going to have to redo These use a terrible these are dreadful and there's a bridge Probably just made it worse Okay Now we're actually progressing it is working if it's slowly Oh, yeah, what I'm doing now is I'm just chopping some of the tail ends off That looks like a bridge And visually inspecting I should get myself a loop Or a set of binocular glasses And I think that moved enough I think This one needs more solder It's not a bridge I'm amazed Okay, those are not good joints, but I think they'll do Just one tiny bit of tidying Right that makes it 9 30 p.m. So I've been at this for an hour and a half So I am going to give this a rest for now And do the rest of it, which is this stuff tomorrow But thanks to the magic of video editing That is just a few moments for you So day two of the keyboard assembly So yesterday I Soldered on this cable rather ineptly and hopefully in an electrically coherent manner Today I'm going to solder the other end onto my chosen controller board And just to remind people of physical layout What's eventually going to happen is this lcd panel We'll plug back on and go here This will all go in a box with some description at a bit of an angle And the controller board will probably be tucked in the back of the box So I actually want this cable to be quite short So let us put it about here on the cable So the first thing we do is we trim the cable And now we need to start sorting out which wires go what Now it's been soldered down so that pin one is the red stripe in the normal fashion Pins one and two are ground and power, which are the ones that go on the end So we want to peel these off first Peel them down to about here The rest of the wires are going to go alternately To the top and bottom of the board So they'll be soldered on about here-ish So looking at the geometry we've got voltage, ground, which are these two The reset line we want to leave unconnected And then pin 0.7 here and 2.3 here are the first data lines These ones are unusable pins due to issues with the board So I'm just wondering the best way to do this Do I want to peel them apart and then strip them all individually? Yes, let's do that If it's a while, this is going to be a slow and laborious job I did actually try to stick the cable to the board Using a sticky pad earlier offline But it didn't really work It may actually be worth just peeling the ribbon cable all the way back And dealing with discrete wires, but let's try it like this to start with Also soldering the cables on is going to be In the right order it's going to be interesting The cables are going to code to the underside of the microcontroller board So that we have access to the top for doing, you know, pushing the buttons So we need to make sure to do the near side first So that we can do the We don't end up covering the things we want to solder through with the other wires The other thing I need to do, which I am not doing right now, I'm going to do later And normally you would do this in the other order Is to map the board Because I need to figure out which of these wires actually controls what on the board The reason why I'm going to do it later Is because the board is dead simple The microcontroller itself doesn't care which wire goes where Everything is remappable with this thing Trivially so So I can change the order of the I can change the assignment of each of the pins in software, including stuff like the Whatever control system is used for the LCD display But the other reason I want to do this afterwards is because I don't really care which of these wires is used for what What I really care about is Which of the pins on the microcontroller board does what So once it's all soldered down I can then check the continuity between this and the actual keys on the keyboard And I don't just figure out the assignment of all the pins But I also get to check electrical continuity Which is always worth having Okay, so We're going to put this about here The cables need to splay out so we need to Give lots of slack So actually let's assume that they're going in at the end Interesting actually Yeah, I was actually planning on soldering this row first Trimming the wires to length soldering these and then doing the other side I'm rather wondering whether I want to do it the other way around Because it's actually going to be more splay than I thought So there are 30 wires which need to go on here I was planning on doing 15 on the top and 15 at the bottom So that'd be 1 2 3 4 5 6 and a gap 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 to here 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 and a gap 14 and 15 to here Okay, that's not so bad So I want to trim them relatively long Because if I actually cut too much off then I'll have to take the whole thing off and try it again Yeah Okay, let's give this a go Let's weigh up So we assume these go here And these ones are about here So We want to take off two centimeters So let's start with the power cable So Do I want to put this one on the bottom row or the top row? Let's go with the bottom row That's also let's make sure that this is actually The wires are slightly Yeah, this one wants to go on the bottom row Because they are getting cross so she let's Let's remove the LCD board Let's do this the other way So Low Yeah, this is just as exciting to do is to look now that one that one As it is to look at So these are the ones that go on the bottom And we've got this one here for length So we want to trim them to approximately Here now we just need to strip them all This is incredibly fiddly But it is actually more reliable than me using wire cutters There's something not quite right about the claw that holds this down It does this doesn't quite move if it's on a cord which it really should But I don't know why so I generally have to give it a nudge It's mostly pretty good but I mentioned the other day that The pins down one end of the connector Are the keyboard matrix and the pins at the other Are the LCD controller I don't know what protocol the LCD controller uses yet It'll be easily a bit bangable I just need to figure it out That's not so great That actually cut the wire I haven't identified yet which ones are the keyboard Colons and Roads that's also not so great I'm using this a bit more Okay Yeah So I need to twist the ends to make them tidy And then I'll go through and tin them all Yeah Okay This did not strip properly And some of the wires have lost strands So I'm not actually particularly convinced about this There's a little bit of safety margin So I could go through and take some more off But rather not As I'm doing the ones at the end I'm bumping the wires further along Okay Soldering Let's try turning the soldering iron on first shall we It does have a lot of power to it So It won't take long to heat up I'm watching the Temperature reading 300 310 20 30 350 And it actually takes a little bit longer for the bit to heat up There we go Oh and an exciting upgrade And I want that one is There's a straight strand of wire Okay, that wasn't brilliant But It goes this way around So Around Why has that actually got too much solder on it To go through the hole That's a pain I think it does Yeah, there's a little wide bit at the end Cutters Yeah Two Three And I'm going to have to solder these Right That says not actually working I'm going to have to do these one at a time At least in small groups And this is one of those things Where I need lots of hands Once I've got a few in it should be better Yeah, those did not actually make joints Because I can't see what I'm doing Ground made a joint And VDD did make a joint This goes into 0.7 0.6 Oh no, no, that is right So I thought I'd missed one I hadn't Of course the order doesn't really matter So it'd be nice to get it right But this is never going to be elegant 0.5 Let's wait for the smoke to dissipate And reset the camera which is nearing the end of a reel Right, not 0.4, 0.30, 0.2 But we go straight to 0.1 Another reason not to try and use any kind of like Header pins or other connectors Is that street wires are actually a lot easier to get on and off boards like this Because they can be soldered and unsoldered one at a time Whereas headers generally have to go on and off as a unit So you've got to unsolder all the pads Before the connector will come off And this is generally incredibly problematic At least for my soldering skills That was 15.5 Yeah, we've run out of port zero and now on to port 15 Which is shared with C-Mod Whatever that is There's a fair pile of custom hardware on these things There are a few dedicated pins, most of them are remappable But I think that's one of the dedicated things 15.3 And now I notice that This pin, this wire is actually out of sequence Never mind It's been trimmed So it's going to have to go to this side of the board So that's going to go into 15.2 15 flux 15.1 15.0 And I've just spotted I have in fact been soldering these to the top of the board And not the bottom Well, that's great So that's not necessarily bad So I was planning for these wires to go underneath And come to this side I could still do that They would be tucked under here Let them come over In fact, the only control that I really need access to is the button here And it's not even a It's just a button connected to a wire Pin 2.2, this one So I don't really need that either I have a feeling that if I were to unsolder these Chances are I would lose a little bit of the end of each wire Some of them didn't really survive the stripping process terribly well You know, there's only a few left to go So I will just solder the rest And then experiment with it I can only remove them again afterwards And that was just carelessness I think I just dropped some solder Yeah, dropped some solder onto the board This goes into pin 3.7 3.8 I don't know if my microphone will pick it up But it sounds like my neighbor upstairs has just started practicing the piano Which they don't do very often 3.4 Okay, now is this going to work? I think this will not too bad actually That actually gives a bit of spring to the wires So I can put this Yeah, that's going to be fine Okay, right Now I need to strip and tin the other side And I've got a bit more slack this time So I'm actually going to try the wire cutters This is not very successful I'm very worried about squeezing too hard and cutting the wire You see, yeah, it's not working So this thing's got this adjustment here for how much it strips by But it's actually undone all the way So this thing's now working Ah, maybe it just doesn't work Yeah, this needs to be a spare piece of wire So that's actually cut through some of the strands And there's enough This piece of wire is just so short that The insulation here hasn't gripped the actual wire inside Which is why it pulled out like that Don't like that much Yeah, but I don't like this either I think I'm generally doing a better job of stripping it than this thing does But it's really dubious So let's just give this one a try And that cut the wire Yeah, I think this does just too thin for the mechanical stripper But so far I haven't managed to wreck one of these wires But the mechanical strippers have So let's stick with this I think stripping wires is one of the things I like least about electronics It's not really a skill you can get away without Oh, I hate it Now you're upstairs discovering new and interesting cords Probably not appearing on the microphone I quite a good cardioid directional mic And this wire is still not twisting very well So these are reasonably straight This one's been bumped Yep, they look okay Tinting time That was close Nearly hit the board Okay, I think that's the lot This one's got a big solder blob on the end So let's make that up a little And so it's got a blob too So starting with this one This goes into port 2.3 I seem to have a bit more wire on this side than I did on the other Because my terrible stripping has actually done a better job So let's see if I can set several And there's a strand of wire that didn't get stuck into the solder Okay, let's just do these three 2.5, 2.3 Good So these two here are the ones I need to skip Because they're the ones used to program the board Depending what they're used for they could be shared Like if they're just switches Then everything will be fine You know, as long as I don't try to program the board with a key press Which will cause the switches to be either grounded or made high But we've got lots of pins Let's just avoid them Looks okay Yeah, this side is easier That's interesting I can actually get them all in this side of the debug Of the programming pins This position is very awkward and my hand is shaking All right Is that a lot? I believe that's a lot Those joints look okay These ones look pretty bad I'm actually going to snip those off just yet I think Yeah, that's fine That will squash into the box It's going to be at a slight angle For ease of typing So this can actually It may even go under the board But there's no problem there All right, well, there's a very dubious looking joint 3.7 is not right That wasn't 3.7 That was 3.6 This is 3.7 Better Those will look okay to me Yeah, mostly less Slip the ones at the bottom The idea is to remove the straight end out That's stretches out It reaches out past the solder joint Because it can easily If you fold over and short again to different joints If pressure is put on it Okay I think that's done So let's turn the iron off Chip away the solder blobs I added something Yeah And I think now it's time to move on to the next phase Which is to map the board And I needed a bit of setup for that, I believe So it'll be right back Okay, here is the setup All I needed was a pen and paper But we're not going to touch that just yet Because now I need to get the PCB off the board And to do this I need My trusty power screwdriver Set to unscrew mode Because we need access to the Track side of the board Now I do have a photo of the board Which I could And I could trace the tracks on that But frankly It's much easier and more reliable to use a continuity tester And involves less thinking A lot of screws Which is kind of a good thing Okay, so the board will just lift off This will go off to one side Okay, so Each key switch is a conductive rubber pad That presses down against the spiral things And connects the two together The That then closes the switch Which connects together two pins on the board So the first thing we need to do is to Label the keys So we're going to go These are just These are purely arbitrary 63 Right, this is the map of our keyboard The other thing I actually need is a different piece of paper Which I should go and get now Which is this one And this is actually going to be the map of the The pins of the board So I need to Mark down a x y grid of All the pins So this may take a few moments Two, three Okay, hopefully I will have fast forwarded through that So you didn't have to watch me do it This gives us a x y grid of all possible pairs of connections on the From the microcontroller to the keyboard So now what we need to do is figure out which keys do what However, the first thing I'm going to do is to sound out The LCD controller pins Because this will actually let us Eliminate a big chunk of these There's quite a lot of pins there So and luckily they are labeled on this side Which saves a lot of time So pin one of the LCD 3.4 There are 14 pins to check that one That was 3.4 3.4 And two 3.5 3.6 As I should have expected But didn't have a very good connection And four 3.7 Okay, here's 3.7 But it's not very happy about it That might not be a good joint So let's mark that I need to resolder that one Also, I am in fact counting these in fact These all wrong So there goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, not 1, 2, 3, 4 So 1, 2, 3 3, 5 3, 6 3, 7, dodgy Don't you do this the right way around I wonder if there's a capacitor in here somewhere That's making it pay funny 12, 0 Nope, just wasn't a good connection 2, 3, 4 Probably 12, 1 12, 2 12, 3 All nice and predictable 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 15, 0 But 4 11 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 What are these? Any? That one 15, 1 But that should be ground Ground, yes 13 BDD Perhaps Yep So that needs to pin 14 As none of the above Interesting Okay, it might This possibility is just not connected to anything And I believe it is just not connected to anything I don't see any tracks come off it here Okay, that's good So we've now actually managed to eliminate 13 pins from our matrix Which is 3, 4, 3, 5, 3, 6, 3, 7 15, 0, 51 So all of this is not on the matrix And meanwhile in the other direction all the way up to 51 Is not in the matrix For the other pins we've got 12, 0 12, 1, 12, 2, 12, 3, 12, 4 So 12, 0 to 12, 4 The none We know that these are not involved in the keyboard matrix On this direction 2, 3, 4 So now we just need to figure out what the combination of the other ones are I need access to I need access to the Connections here and also Here That's a good way to do this And I can actually get at the copper from the top of the microcontroller board So I can do it this way around So Key number one up here Is this one here And you see there's even some handy test tracks So you stick that in there and we run this along Right, I can actually see which one is going off there This would be much easier had I soldered these on to the correct side of the board So So That did somewhat Fail That is 0.1 And this one is Dean point So 0, 1 Here 15, 3 Here Is key number one Yay Right So we had So we now need to repeat this for all the other keys You know This is a complete waste of time I don't need to manually map the board I have a microcontroller here that can do it for me I've identified which rows were the The keyboard matrix So I've only got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 I've only got 17 by 17 Possible combinations So it was in fact be really easy to write a very simple program that runs on the microcontroller board That cycles through all the combinations And if it sees a connection It just outputs the Which key it is So I don't need any of this mapping at all The only thing I actually needed to do Was to identify The pin assignments I'm done Well that was a complete waste of time So it'd be really nice to have thought of this before making the video Because then I would have seemed like really clever for having said it But no The hardware is now done Apart from, you know, reassembling everything And the next stage is to go to the computer And start programming I would kind of like to have some of that on video as well But I can easily record And do the actual programming bit But I also need to be able to Video me doing stuff on the board as well at the same time Because it's a hardware project So I'm going to have to think whether that's possible or not I'm kind of glad I don't have to go through and map everything Once I'd figured out the routine It wouldn't have taken nearly as long as that first key indicated And there's still work to do in terms of actually putting it all into work It is something that you can actually type on like a reasonable case One One annoyance is that even though this thing has mounting posts Although not very many mounting posts These two that will hold the keyboard reasonably securely The controller board has no way of mounting it What I did for a different project was to just like stick it on Using a sticky pad On the bottom of the PCB But that's not really satisfactory Yeah, I could have done the necessary stuff Figuring out the pinout without even taking the board off Great Well If anyone is still watching this far I probably don't have any credibility left to lose anyway So never mind Another potential modification I could make Is to add diodes everywhere to turn it into a N key roll over keyboard But to be honest, I don't actually understand how they work So I'm just going to leave it like this for now And one thing I absolutely do need to do is to figure out what this stuff up here does It's related to the caps lock key That I know Out because One of the pins is connected to the LED But I don't know why there would be a NAND gate here to run it Surely the LED is driven directly from the board Which actually I should have mapped out Whether the LED was connected To pins on the microcontroller Luckily the LED legs are exposed So I can do that Without taking the possible of the board off again So let's try ground first Because I bet one end is connected to ground No BDD Also no Interesting So this leg Connects here to the NAND gate That's not This one does not appear to be connected to any of these Okay Well that's good to know I'm going to have to sit down with a scan of the board And actually figure out the circuit diagram Okay well Some of these connections are going to come loose pretty soon This one's not brilliant It's not mechanically secure But anyway It is now electrically complete So I can move it over to the computer and start programming Quick addendum before I wrap up for the day I tried powering it up to see what happened The microcontroller is unprogrammed And you get by default this blinky light But I have discovered what that NAND gate does It's the caps lock logic It's done by the keyboard In hardware So I'm willing to bet that the shift keys are reported as being actual keys But the caps lock key Is reported as a modifier key So this has now got the caps lock key held down When I press shift it releases it It doesn't toggle Because this is a typewriter keyboard And typewriters release the caps lock when you press shift But this is no use for me Because I want to turn this into a control key So I'm going to have to figure out the circuitry And probably rip some of it out To turn this back into an ordinary modifier key But it's really interesting The LED is controlled by the keyboard You can see it light up on the camera Yes you can I thought this would be routed to a pin on the motherboard Well isn't that interesting I mean I've got bare pins I can run a piece of wire to the controller To actually drive the LED myself if I wanted to Well there you go As an addendum to the addendum Before I actually wrap up I try plugging the LCD panel back in And then powering up And what does it do when it's not connected to a computer? Self test mode So I can actually It occurs to me this is not going to be impossible to see on the screen On the camera there you go So it has actually lit up some of the segments So you can see all the things that are available I've no idea whether any of these things are going to be useful Apart from the 15 alphanumeric things But at least that works