Look at this beauty. It's an LPFK by IBM. A "lightable programmable function keyboard" normally attached to a 5080 IBM graphics card for CAD purposes on RS/6000 machines running AIX. The IT-department of the University of Karlsruhe threw it away. Because it looks so unique and nerdish, and has even LEDs in it, i decided to reverse engineer it to connect it to a pc.



Just cut off the 8-pin AIX connector, and solder a normal DB9-Connector for your serial port (or better USB-to-serial convertor) to it. I sucked the 5 Volts out of my computers USB-port.

Orange
Black		+5 Volts
Green
White		GND, Pin 5
RedPin 2
GreyPin 3
YellowNot needed
BlueNot needed




Serial communication is easy: 9600 8N1, no handshake. Everytime you press a key, the keyboard sends "Kxx{0A}" to your keyboard, xx being the ascii-representation of a 2-digit hex-number, {0A} as carriage return. Key 0 is top left, Key 1 one to the right, and so on. Normally a key is highlited as soon as you press it, and all other LEDs are turned off. You can stop this behaviour by sending "I0{0A}" or "I1{0A}" to turn it on again. You can set the state of each individual LED by sending "Saabbccdd{0A}". "a" is the ascii-representation of a 2-digit hex-number. Because there are 32 LEDs, you need 4 bytes.



My other projects


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Comments

[ bethasda | 16.03.06 22:17 ]
Where to get one?

[ fettes_z | 11.06.06 17:37 ]
Simply have a look at ebay 9740254135. My auction will end on June, 18th at 17:17

Regards.
micha

[ TTG_Berthold | 18.12.06 22:54 ]
F the optimus keyboard. This rawks!

[ Mike | 13.04.08 03:28 ]
I can't get my LPFK to talk to a PC. I'm pretty good with my serial communications, but I'm not able to get it to do anything when the switch on the back set to 'non loopback'.

Any ideas? My meter and breakout box are not showing me anything. It's almost as though it refuses to speak unless you give it a magic initialization string, which I don't know.

[ mnt | the codeninja, 14.04.08 18:41 ]
Strange, mine happily sends strings the minute you power it on.

[ Mike | 19.04.08 17:07 ]
I would love to get the details by email, but mnt2008 caused an unknown user error. I am at mbbrutman aatt brutman.com

Regards,
Mike

[ Dezro | 06.06.08 00:13 ]
I found one without a cable - if you could post the pinout from the LPFK that'd be excellent.

[ Phil Pemberton | 09.06.09 15:37 ]
I've done some work on a driver library for the LPFK, which is here:
http://hg.philpem.me.uk/liblpfk/

Also, Michael Brutman has documented the protocol:
http://brutman.com/IBM_LPFK/IBM_LPFK.html

Note that he's also put a nifty little template on there -- add text, print at 300dpi, cut out the blank squares, and apply to the LPFK.

Lastly, the pinout is here:
http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2008-August/261425.html

(posted by myself to the "classiccmp" mailing list last year)

The LPFK is a fun little toy -- I do wonder if yours has had its microcontroller replaced at some point though, Codeninja.

I still have yet to find a use for it, though...

And one of these days, I really should add it to my website properly, instead of just leaving it on HgWeb.


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