Building a USB to Mac ADB keyboard adapter
paperstack.com
paperstack.com
That’s a bit unfair towards Apple. ADB is from 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus), PS/2 from 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port), so they couldn’t have used PS/2.
Not to say there weren't problems. I had a Compaq couldn't speak to most PS/2 keyboards, so when my keyboard broke, I had to go find another Compaq keyboard on campus before I could use the computer again.
Note: keyboards and mice were pretty low risk. High risk were PS2-based barcode scanners.
(I should really get around to taking that project beyond the prototype stage)
Seems like keyboard adapters are a popular thing around here.
(I recommend against doing this except as a party trick, because these old mice were never intended to be used on a high-resolution screen)
I paid $35 for one brand new on Amazon just a couple years back.
I too used an old Apple keyboard when I first started using a Mac for work because the flat keyboard’s were nightmarish. I moved to a HHKB Lite 2 [2], and through several other keyboards before ultimate landing on a UNIX layout Sun Type 7 as my Mac keyboard of choice.
That’s a shame, they made some neat stuff over the years.
https://incipio.com/pages/griffintechnology
Owned by the same company that owns Incase and Survivior. I can’t quite tell if the company and/or brand were bought, or if the company renamed itself. Their products don’t seem nearly as innovative as the old Griffin was though.
[Edit: oh, hey, they’re the same company that recently bought the Microsoft accessory designs: https://www.incase.com/pages/incase-designed-by-microsoft]
At one point Apple did make one keyboard with the CTRL key in the correct place!
The CAPSLOCK key is, for me, the most useless key.
Who uses it and why! LOL
I should really remap CAPSLOCK be CTRL on my Mac, but I dont use CTRL that often and prefer just to roll with the stock defaults most of the time.
EDIT: I quickly Binged the Mac keyboard I was thinking of, and got this result:
* https://controlaltbackspace.org/ctrl/
> There’s a better place to put it, right on a large, easy-to-press key that you rarely use: Caps Lock. A few keyboards throughout the years have gotten this right, like Apple’s Standard Keyboard for the Macintosh II and SE:
The backspace key has been at the location it is (far right of number row) for well over 100 years. Indeed its placement preceeds the existence of the Return key, as prior to the IBM Electric (1935) and similar, typewriters had a manual carriage return bar. That's a century of keyboards and muscle memory that you're trying to undo.
As a touch typist, any keyboard that moved the backspace key would be awful. Still better than the ergonomic nightmare that is the ISO european keyboard.
Also, aesthetically, I like the fact that backspace is to the left and delete to the right, the directions in which the command acts. But mainly, I'm not an especially accurate typist, and I change my mind a lot, a home row backspace is a godsend.
This remap leads to some pretty comical results when I find myself using a board which doesn't have them, the first time I make a mistake it STAYS ANd I get something like that, a run of capital letters and then lowercase as I instinctively hit caps lock again to try and delete them.
(TLDR: compatibility with Apple’s off-USB-spec keyboard power button, but the circuit they used accidentally injects noise which wreaks havoc on the data lines when it’s unpowered and left floating.)
It also reminded me of another piece of evidence for the difficulty in computing to name things:
Keyboard have had the keys F1, F2, and so on since at least the 80s. They are called "function keys", and modern PCs have 12 of them.
Then some time during the 90s (I guess?) laptop manufacturers decided they needed to squeeze more functionality into ordinary letter keys, and invented the a new key to enable the alternate functions. Obviously, then, they had to name that key "Fn", for "function".
On my work Dell machine I can press "function function 1" to mute or unmute the audio, for instance. Fantastic.
Heh. Not intentionally. All the hard work is the QMK project and nothing to do with me. TinkerCAD is literally designed for kids and completely the wrong tool for the job. I'm pleased (and faintly surprised) with how well it turned out, though, so perhaps a little bragging there.
Good point about the "fn" versus "F" key naming overload!
At about age 10, my brother and I chained two keyboards together and played video games like that. Once we did four with some friends but Escape Velocity would slow down to a complete crawl. Not sure why it did that.
I wired up a similar adapter using a 5v ProMicro, and used the older TMK firmware, which works a treat.
I did find the python tool in QMK very helpful for getting the binary burned into the Atmega though; I'm not sure it would have been as smooth sailing with TMK.
(In the past I've tended to shy away from python-based tooling - I don't know enough about the language or its infrastructure to interpret the error messages when a jenga tower of code and dependencies falls over with messages about wheels or somesuch. I'm too old to have much patience with that kind of side-quest! I'm sure it's all a lot more mature and dependable these days, though.)
Normally I shy away from python/node/perl/intercal tooling much as you describe, but it was very painless. I was mostly expecting to document "giving up and figuring out how I should actually be using avrdude in preference to understanding someone else's language's error and/or config messages" but tripped over a stair that wasn't there when it just worked from the outset.
Discounting the bit where I tried to use a borked USB cable that is...
The qmk discord mentioned they had no interest in taking this patchset so I imagine I will be doing this for a once off. Thank you for the resources.
There are options for using modern USB devices on ADB as well, such as the ADBuino (https://github.com/akuker/adbuino) and my fork called HIDHopper (https://github.com/TechByAndroda/HIDHopper_ADB).
One thing that's nice about the CH32X035 is that it can run at 5V so it's trivial to interface over ADB - you just need the pull-up. It has some internal level translation for the USB data pins.
I got around this by running an Ubuntu VM on Parallels. I ssh in using VSCode and configured Parallels to forward application ports to the Mac side, so I can hit the web apps we build using Chrome on the Mac side.
I worked in a lab full of Mac II, IIc, and similar vintage computers. The irritating placement of the home key nubs drove me nuts -- I eventually vandalized all the keyboards by shaving off the nubs on D and K and putting marks on F and J.
The lab networked all the computers together to the laser printer using whatever that ADB networking gizmo was, which was super neat -- no other computer in the lab had networking; a couple of the PCs had serial connections to terminal servers.
The macs in the labs were amazing compared to the PCs. The difference between a IIcx and some random 286 of roughly the same vintage.
I'm not going to disparage wired keyboards, but it IS handy to have wireless. I've also learned to always keep them close together, so the connection doesn't get dropped.