deskthority

A friend recently send me a PC magazine link to an article regarding Soviet-era PC's. The first picture showed an old PC from Pripyat. Just wondering about that keyboard... looks pretty cool. Not sure if we have any Soviet PC experts here, but if so... any info on that? Mfg, origin, keyswitches, etc.?

http://in.pcmag.com/gallery/97387/the-l ... et-pcs?p=1

A larger version on Jean Andersen's Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/52742625@N02/9671157181/

Its possible they are hall effect or a clone , look at that spacebar switch , its a very similar mount to the microswitch switches on a space cadet.

It makes sense , if you are going to have your reactor explode and spread radioactive dust over the nearby area and contaminated graphite all over the roof of your building , you want a switch that is reliable.

Pro tip building a reactor without a hard containment is NOT, i repeat NOT a good idea.

Sweet caps too.

From Pripyat eh? Does it come with radioactive backlighting by any chance?

Definitely is Hall effect clones. This is my only Russian Board, so I'm shocked that it just happened to be almost identical to board you found pictured there! Had been thinking of posting pics, just hadn't gotten around to it:

orihalcon wrote: Definitely is Hall effect clones. This is my only Russian Board, so I'm shocked that it just happened to be almost identical to board you found pictured there!

Yep, we also had this gerkonic recently. Same or quite similair switch IMO:

http://deskthority.net/photos-videos-f6 ... 12431.html

Pretty neat stuff, guys - thanks for the posts, pictures, and the information.

The PCB on that looks amazing. It's strange though, maybe it's the picture but you can't see the pinout through the holes in the mounting plate Oo .

If you look close, there's a black through hole integrated circuit cup looking thing that sticks straight up and that's the Hall effect sensor. The plastic part of the switch just slides right over that. There's a magnet that goes by it when the switch is pressed. The Microswitch Honeywell ones at least in some variants are the same where the switch can be easily disassembled, except the Honeywell ones have two magnets going on both sides of the sensor.

Too bad that we don't have a good replacement controller firmware for these! You'd think 40 years later an arduino setup would be fairly straightforward. I'm thinking one issue could have to do with the Hall effect sensors originally being used with more than 5v and probably a lot more current available. The sensors are kind of unique in that they need power going to each one rather than just being an on/off conductive switch since they are solid state without any moving parts.

Ah yes, now I see! Very interesting, I never would have thought the two are so easily separable =o .

I need to put a Hall effect on my acquisition list.

orihalcon wrote: Too bad that we don't have a good replacement controller firmware for these! You'd think 40 years later an arduino setup would be fairly straightforward. I'm thinking one issue could have to do with the Hall effect sensors originally being used with more than 5v and probably a lot more current available. The sensors are kind of unique in that they need power going to each one rather than just being an on/off conductive switch since they are solid state without any moving parts.

Working on it. Seriously, check the Wang keyboard thread: http://deskthority.net/workshop-f7/conv ... 12379.html

At least with the Wang board there are some issues:

1. I haven't yet calculated how much power the whole board needs. It may be more than USB can provide. I may need to add an additional power supply to mine.

2. Every board is different. The Wang board doesn't have any logic whatsoever and requires an additional controller to strobe rows and columns.

3. The switches, from what I've seen, are sense only. When you press a switch, you get one "switch pressed" event, that's it. You can't tell that the difference between a press and release and a press and hold.

I'm still working actively on reverse engineering my Wang board but the techniques there should apply to all Hall effect boards. Stay tuned.

derp