As I mentioned in the "stuff you just bought" thread, I recently got a nice, but very broken Psion MC400 laptop. Fortunately, the keyboard is absolutely pristine and feels fantastic. This thread will be an interactive exhibit of a strange man trying to reverse-engineer a keyboard for the first time.
The Psion MC400 is a British-made laptop from 1989. With apparently less than 1000 units made, this is a really cool collection piece. Of course, since it was 1989, no expense was spared and the keyboard is a G80-1600 manufactured by Cherry.
The keyboard is beautiful. It looks like the original MX 60%, and even has arrow keys! The keycaps are nice, thick Cherry doubleshot, but more grey than the normal Cherry keycaps so they can't really be mixed-and-matched with them. The switches are vintage MX clears -- which, I have to say, are really quite nice. I don't even normally like MX clears very much!
Here's a shot of it alongside my blue Alps Alps64 board:
It's basically an ISO HHKB with arrow keys, guys! How cool is that?!
Since the laptop itself is probably beyond my repair skills, I've decided to repurpose the keyboard.
Step 1: Exposing the matrix!
Thankfully, the keyboard is connected to the mainboard via an 18-pin ribbon cable. This should make accessing the matrix pretty easy, and I don't need to reverse-engineer any weird 1989 protocols.
Here's a close-up of the ribbon:
The ribbon is connected to the keyboard's PCB via a ribbon connector, meaning that this ribbon should hopefully be pretty easy to replace with something that gives me access to the pins for reverse-engineering the matrix (wow, that last part sounds really cool without context).
This cable looks like a good fit, but I have yet to check pitch etc:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/39240900 ... 4495b56aa0
More info as I have time to do it!
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