Off and on over the years I've massaged different ideas trying to come up with a practical, compact keyboard with few keys to replace the QWERTY keyboard for compact, home-made computers where room constraints rule out normal desktop computer keyboards. What I have come up with has always suffered in the area of user-friendlines.

Now I see FrogPad ( www.frogpad.com ) has come up with a small one of about 20 keys for portable applications. I'm not so sure it could be labeled as initially user-friendly, but they say you can actually touch type on it (with one hand) after about an hour of practice, and do about 40 words per minute after ten hours of training. They want to make this an industry standard and it looks like they may have what it takes to succeed. I'd be interested to get anyone else's opinions on this, or discuss various ideas and aspects of less-than-full keyboards for our portable, home-made computer projects.

In tip #26 of the "Tip of the Day" subject on the Delphi forum about a year and a half ago I described a 5-key keypad, and a two key plus 2-bit gray-code rotary encoder. These work great for a range of applications where you don't actually have to type in much text. What I'm looking for here is to fill in that text-entry hole. I was almost resigned to having to type the 2-digit hex ASCII code for each character on a 16-key keypad, and additionally possibly have cursor keys, <Enter>, <Esc>, etc.. Since I started working at this stuff by assembling by hand and entering text in hex ASCII in that first computer class 21 years ago, I know from experience that the ASCII codes don't take that long to master if you use them much. Still, it wouldn't be the least bit friendly to anyone else.

I've looked the FrogPad website over and I don't see any full explanation of how things are entered. I'm not about to buy one of their keypads just yet, since they're still $230 and they're USB only! Especially if this is going to become some sort of standard though, I would like to find out how to operate it and make my own to interface through a few 65c22 bits or maybe even use something like a 74c923 keypad encoder.

Garth

These things come and go. You'd think by now we'd have a substitute for the typewriter-style keyboard, but either there just isn't one or our imagination is too limited.

That frog thing looks familiar in some way. What little I can get out of the small images on that web site reminds me of the awkwardness of laptop "pointing devices" though, whether glidepad or eraserhead (and my laptop has both). I'd hate to write it off just like that, but I'm not sold yet. I agree with you in principle though: we need something between the hex keypad and the full typewriter layout.

Remember that goofy thing called something like "The Write Hander" that was this plastic hemisphere with a few buttons lying under the fingers and thumb of one hand? Seems like there were two buttons under the thumb and a few under each finger and you somehow entered ASCII in binary or something? This was a mid to late 70s thing, though I think I saw the idea "rediscovered" in the early 90s.

Look at all of those handprint-OCR attempts on PDAs. Never was too popular even with those who had to have the status of owning a PDA. Soon as they were out PDA keyboards got scooped up like tortilla chips. And where are we? Full keyboard again.

But maybe this frog thing can make it. It looks awkward as heck, but it tries to meet a need nobody else is satisfying.

What are people using for an PS2 keyboard interface in an '02 system ?

Rob,

Lee Davison has one on the Hardware miniprojects page of 6502.org and you'll find one I did on my web site under the IO device's Tab.

Daryl

http://65c02.tripod.com/

Hi Daryl,

Have you thought about using one of those PALM foldable keyboards? I believe those are mainly SERIAL port devices, therefore it should be easy to interface with a standard project (obviously, provided someone takes the painfull steps of programing the driver ).

Cheers,
Nelson

Nelson,

They are very compact and I'm sure they would be easy to incorporate. My biggest problem is having a limited budget and next to nothing in test equipment.

I have not searched for any tech specs on those keyboards. Purhaps someone else has already figured out the hardware and signal timing.

So much to do, so little time!

Daryl

Really? That's funny. I see maybe one keyboard in my local Bestbuy. The rest are all pen-input devices. Nobody I know who owns a PDA has a keyboard. Literally.

PalmOS's Graffiti revolutionized pen input because OCR doesn't work; Graffiti doesn't rely on OCR, but rather input stream pattern recognition, which is much more accurate, because it recognizes input characters as you enter them, in real-time.

Still, pen-input has no bearing on this, since it's impractical to supply pen-based input on homebrew or inexpensive hardware.

For those who want nice input keyboards, one should check out Chuck Moore's ColorForth. FrogPad appears to almost exactly replicate the (ideally) desired keyboard by Moore. Moore's keyboard is 27 keys, and is suitable for touch-typing, though most applications which run under ColorForth utilize only 15 keys at most. While highly modal, it's not hard to get used to, and is easily adaptable to a modeless operation.

--
Samuel A. Falvo II

Hi,

well i found a rather uncomplicated solution for the keyboard-"problem". A rather cheap 50 key plastic-film-type one, that can be scissored individually to your needs. Try google with the keyword "PKM-50".

Greetz,
Paul

FrogPad's website is a lot better now than when I first posted. As I remember, it was frustrating back then that you couldn't get a good picture of one or any explanation on how to use it. Now the instructions are online at http://www.frogpad.com/Store/training.asp# They're way overpriced and not available in any simple interface like RS-232, but there's enough info there to make your own. If it really will become some kind of standard, we might as well learn it. It looks like that if we made a small, portable computer to sell and incorporated it, we'd have to pay FrogPad royalties-- I just hope they're more reasonable than the $180 or so they want for a USB FrogPad.

If I'm not mistaken, a PS/2 keyboard interface can talk directly to the 6522's serial port. They are electrically compatible, last I recalled. There is even a hardware mini-project on this site showing how to do it, IIRC.

> a PS/2 keyboard interface can talk directly to the 6522's serial port.

As far as I can tell, the FrogPad is only available in USB. I can't find any mention of PS/2 keyboard interfaces interfaces on their website.

PS/2 <--> USB adapters should be relatively common. Most regular PC keyboards come with one (e.g., my Microsoft natural keyboard is a USB keyboard; yet, because it came with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter, I'm using it on a PC that doesn't have USB drivers installed).

--
Samuel A. Falvo II

Can you buy such an interface adapter separately? How much would it cost? Would it be any good for other things besides keyboards?

Unfortunately the PS/2 <--> USB adapter ONLY adapts the physical connection. Most of these products have clever start up code that detects what type of bus they are on and changes the protocol to match. Any USB device that doesn't also have PS2 capable drivers won't work with such an adapter.



That's because it's operating in PS2 mode as a PS2 device.

Cheers,

Lee.

I have a photo of a very similar gadget, the MicroWriter, on my web site:

http://www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/org.htm

Scroll about halfway down for the photo.

The clever (and I believe, patented) thing about the MicroWriter was the mapping of button-presses to the letters of the alphabet. It was carefully arranged so that the shape of the letter gave you a hint as to which buttons to press. There was also a carefully-designed tutorial and practice session. I found I could learn the code in one evening and could use it easily thereafter. Convincing other people that they can do this, though, is hard!

Ultimately, I think the system died out because people just didn't believe they could learn to use it.