The first thing to do was take apart a regular keyboard and figure out how it worked.
The little circuit board there has two sets of thirteen terminals. A keypress is registered when a circuit is completed between one terminal from the left set and one terminal from the right set. All the rest in a keyboard is just a matter of getting the circuit to the right place.
So I started out by mapping all the connections from each terminal to each other terminal. I did this by plugging the circuit board into my laptop, clipping one end of the aligator clip to a terminal and touching the other end to every other terminal. Most of the conections produced nothing at all or perhaps a beep, but sometimes a letter would pop up and I would record which two terminals were connected. This allowed me to make a chart of the entire keyboard for later use.
Next: The basic keys.
The little circuit board there has two sets of thirteen terminals. A keypress is registered when a circuit is completed between one terminal from the left set and one terminal from the right set. All the rest in a keyboard is just a matter of getting the circuit to the right place.
So I started out by mapping all the connections from each terminal to each other terminal. I did this by plugging the circuit board into my laptop, clipping one end of the aligator clip to a terminal and touching the other end to every other terminal. Most of the conections produced nothing at all or perhaps a beep, but sometimes a letter would pop up and I would record which two terminals were connected. This allowed me to make a chart of the entire keyboard for later use.
Next: The basic keys.
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