chickenplucker
Well-known member
For some reason, I'm not sure why, I have decided to shove a Dell 1545 motherboard that I revived from our shops junk pile into a dead Powerbook 160 I had kicking around. I think it started when a couple of my friends started talking about how we used to play Lode Runner back in the day, and how neat it would be to take a chunky old powerbook into the student union or some coffee shop and play Minecraft on it or something. So after finding the 1545 board, running around the south bridge with a heat gun, and fitting a new DC jack, I got a posting board for the project with some decent power behind it.
I got a nice little LED LCD thats for a Dell mini 10 and it seems to fit in the bezel pretty good, only issue is that some of the frame is visible, but I kind of like it the more I look at it. If need be I could throw a strip of black plastic over it.
I want this to look as stock as possible when done, so that means keeping the keyboard and track ball. The track ball should not be an issue since it seems to just be ADB on a ribbon so all thats needed there is an iMate adapter gutted and wired in to get it to USB. The keyboard on the other hand is going to be the major hurtle in this thing. I've got the pinout from the daughter boards ribbon, and have it running into a ps2 controller just to make sure it would spit out something.
But getting it wired up right is going to be tricky since theres no controller that matches that matrix on the keyboard, so I think its going to end up using an Arduino or a PIC. If anyone has any suggestions or ideas on getting that sorted it would be appreciated. Also if anyone has a picture of the matrix in that keyboard I'd love to see it since I really dont want to break those plastic rivets on the back
I got a nice little LED LCD thats for a Dell mini 10 and it seems to fit in the bezel pretty good, only issue is that some of the frame is visible, but I kind of like it the more I look at it. If need be I could throw a strip of black plastic over it.
I want this to look as stock as possible when done, so that means keeping the keyboard and track ball. The track ball should not be an issue since it seems to just be ADB on a ribbon so all thats needed there is an iMate adapter gutted and wired in to get it to USB. The keyboard on the other hand is going to be the major hurtle in this thing. I've got the pinout from the daughter boards ribbon, and have it running into a ps2 controller just to make sure it would spit out something.
But getting it wired up right is going to be tricky since theres no controller that matches that matrix on the keyboard, so I think its going to end up using an Arduino or a PIC. If anyone has any suggestions or ideas on getting that sorted it would be appreciated. Also if anyone has a picture of the matrix in that keyboard I'd love to see it since I really dont want to break those plastic rivets on the back