NeXT non-adb keyboard protocol?

[Michael Engel]

Hi,

does anyone have a description of the protocol a non-ADB NeXT
keyboard uses to communicate with a Station or Cube? I.e.,
synchronous or asynchronous, bit rate, #of start/data/stop
bits (if applicable), keycodes sent and commands received
from the NeXT, encoding of the mouse data (I assume this is
handled by the keyboard microcontroller)? The pinout of the
non-ADB keyboard mini-DIN plug would also be useful.

Why do I want this? Well, I have two Stations and a Cube, only
two keyboards and one of the kbds is failing, so I'm thinking
about using an ATMEL AVR microcontroller to convert a standard
PS/2 keyboard to be used with the machines.

regards,
Michael
--
Michael Engel - mengel@informatik.uni-marburg.de
Philipps-Universität Marburg - FB Mathematik und Informatik
Hans-Meerwein-Str. - 35032 Marburg
Tel. 06421 / 28 21562 - Fax: 06421 / 28 21573

[David Evans]

In article <buc658$l3l$1@surz18.uni-marburg.de>,
Michael Engel <mengel@informatik.uni-marburg.de> wrote:does anyone have a description of the protocol a non-ADB NeXTkeyboard uses to communicate with a Station or Cube?

I don't think that it was ever documented. However, I do believe
that the pinout is around somewhere (I don't recall where) so some
ingenuity would likely allow you to figure it out. It may be a two-way
protocol, however, so it might be a good idea to passively eavesdrop on
a working system.

The mouse is a simple quadrature device, so processing would be done
either by the keyboard microcontroller and/or something on the sound
box board.

--
David Evans dfevans@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer/Synth Junkie http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~dfevans/
University of Waterloo "Default is the value selected by the composer
Ontario, Canada overridden by your command." - Roland TR-707 Manual

[Dan Moore]

Michael Engel <mengel@informatik.uni-marburg.de> wrote in message news:<buc658$l3l$1@surz18.uni-marburg.de>... Hi, does anyone have a description of the protocol a non-ADB NeXT keyboard uses to communicate with a Station or Cube? I.e., synchronous or asynchronous, bit rate, #of start/data/stop bits (if applicable), keycodes sent and commands received from the NeXT, encoding of the mouse data (I assume this is handled by the keyboard microcontroller)? The pinout of the non-ADB keyboard mini-DIN plug would also be useful.

Well, there has been some work done on this. I donated a NeXT system
to someone I know for just this purpose. His results so far are here:

http://www.68k.org/~degs/nextkeyboard.html