I have a 1991 laptop keyboard w/o the motherboard. It was attached to the main board with two flexible cables. The keyboard feels awesome and I would like to make use of it. The issue is that I can't identify what connector this is (see pic. attached) and I don't know what keyboard controller was used to drive it. The flexible connectors are 0.59'' (~1.5 cm) and 0.43'' (~1.1 cm) in width.
My questions are:
- What's the common name of this flexible cable connector, if any?
- How to turn the keyboard into a usable one with an MCU (i.e. how to connect it to Arduino or Raspberry Pi, or any other micro controller/board)?
If it's hard to tell, I'd appreciate an advice on how to reverse engineer the keyboard to connect it to any modern controller (AVR, RPi, what not).
More pics:
PS: The Part No. on the back of the keyboard says SU54TM017DK but googling returns zero hits.
Best Answer
If you want easy-mode, you need a keyboard controller. Interfacing with a microcontroller is silly if all you want to do is route the keypresses to a PC (or USB host)... unless you are trying to learn how a keyboard controller works (by implementing one in your own firmware).
This one is a common one in industrial/custom projects: SK5100/SK5101 - Low Cost USB/PS2 Programmable FlexMatrix Industrial Keyboard Encoder
http://sprintek.com/products/sk5100.aspx
It works like this:
It has enough keyswitche support to cover the keyboard in the photos (and then some). 8x20 = 160 switches in matrix form. It can even drive RGB backlighting if you want to add that.
You can read the datasheet to learn more about how keyboard matrix switches work and you can reverse engineer your keyboard with a multimeter to confirm which pins match which I/O lines on the controller chip.
The cool thing about this controller is that it comes with a dev tool that lets you reprogram the keycode-to-switch mapping so you can figure out the exact wiring of the keyboard after-the-fact in case you got a few lines swapped.