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Powerbook 160 mod

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.

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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.

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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 :)

 

Bunsen

Admin-Witchfinder-General
Very, very nice! I look forward to more photos and news as this hack progresses.

A few thoughts:

only issue is that some of the frame is visible / I could throw a strip of black plastic over it.
Any chance you'll have a leftover strip of Powerbook grey plastic that could go there? Or perhaps you could find some matching grey craft card?

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.
Would it be possible to gut a USB trackball or mouse for the controller board and tap the raw feed from the ball?

The keyboard on the other hand is going to be the major hurtle in this thing.
LOL :eek:)

getting it wired up right is going to be tricky since theres no controller that matches that matrix on the keyboard
Could you use key re-mapping software? Assuming you can get a unique output for each key, and maybe wire directly to the modifier keys.

 

chickenplucker

Well-known member
Hi Bunsen!

I may end up gettting another dead 100 series Book of from Ebay soon so I can rip the keyboard open, and in that case I could cut a strip of matching grey plastic to help fill that in, but I'm not sure about how the seems at the edges would end up looking. At anyrate it will be another bridge to cross when the time comes :beige:

The USB conversion: Maybe. I thought about gutting a mouse a USB mouse and doing something similer, but it looked like a lot of work. With the imate adapter it will just plug in and work like a USB mouse. One issue though that may change this though is the fact that the motherboard needs to be able to squeeze under a part of the track ball. Its going to be a very tight fit and it looks like it may have to play with my dremel a bit for everything to fit. But if that fails then it will be back to the USB mouse/trackball conversion.

My plan from the start was to just wire it straight into a PS/2 keyboard controller and then worry about remapping everything on the Os side. Which kind of works, but since the actual keyboard matrices are so diffrent, it left large dead spots on the powerbook keyboard. It may be possible to get around this once I have another Powerbook keyboard too look at, but at the moment its not looking to good. So I'm playing around with getting and Arduino to play as an HID USB device, then load a keyboard matrix library in it and have it prettend to be the controller. But then Arduinos are chunky things, and that might mean lossing the harddrive in order to gain more room, and replacing it with a large USB drive or SD card.

Long ways to go, but I'm learning a bunch which is fun. Just going to keep pushing on and hope for the best :) .

 

techknight

Well-known member
there are PS2 emulator codes all over the internet for various microprocessors.

All you have to do is take one of these, and add your own matrix key-scanning codes, and itll spit out PS2 compatible ASCII.

Simple enough. PIC/AVR whatever. heck one of them is in 6805 and 6811 code .

this is EXTREMELY popular in the MAME world. something to look at.

 

Bunsen

Admin-Witchfinder-General
There's a project called kbdbabel you might want to look at. Another thought - steal the controller board from a desktop ADB keyboard, attach it to the keyboard ribbon cable (somehow - last time I looked into this, the cables had the same number of lines but were a different size) and then plug that into the iMate.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
There's no real need for a processor for remapping a KBD Matrix. A simple ROM/EPROM Hack will give you whatever output you need from any given input, when programmed with the appropriate I/O matrix.

IOW, map any given KBD's keyswitch matrix ribbon cable output, using connectors stolen off MoBo or KBD Controller Board soldered to a home-brew (Radio Shack still carries all needed to do simple, SS or DS, PCB etching) adapter board as your Input. Solder the donor controller board directly to the adapter board for best results or jumpered with patch wires if spacial constraints necessitate this approach for Output/Native Controller conversion.

IIRC, Don Lancaster spec'd this setup in either the TTL Cookbook or the CMOS Cookbook. [;)] ]'>

 
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