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pkoning2 / lk201emu

Emulate DEC LK201 keyboard using a standard PC USB keyboard
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
46 stars 7 forks source link

Keyboard blinking constantly, very intermittent keypresses going through #6

Open abzman opened 3 years ago

abzman commented 3 years ago

OK, this has been bugging me for a while and I think I've finally fixed it but I want to know how this ever worked for anyone else. The lines 938-940 in lk201.ino seem to mean that every time the keyboard is connected, the software disconnects it. I commented out those three lines and now it works perfectly. What I want to know is why were those lines in there at all? did it work as is for anyone else? should I issue a pull request that deletes those three lines?

abzman commented 3 years ago

I take it back, it doesn't work perfectly for me now, it boots up and the usb state goes to green, then off just before it throws a keyboard error, but after that any character I type makes it green again and seems to work perfectly

pkoning2 commented 3 years ago

Unfortunately it's hard to do good error handling given that there is no real way to send error reports. At one point I had it send various distinct error codes as different morse code letters. The purpose of line 938 is to send the standard LK201 power-up notification to the host or terminal. That tells it there is a keyboard, and if the controlling device wants to set any non-standard keyboard settings it would generally do so in response to that notification. For example, RSTS would change the edit keys to be autorepeat, not up/down as is the surprising default, and it would turn off keyclick so it can generate clicks in the driver to acknowledge those keys for which it wants the click. Do you have the powerup beeping enabled (the little morse code sequence)? If there's an error that crashes the controller it would resend that sequence. If you're just seeing various light colors and blinking, that means the USB state machine is recycling through its state. I could imagine that being a broken keyboard, or a bad USB cable. If you can swap keyboards or cables or the cable adapter, that's worth a try. It's been very reliable for me (though right now I'm using the PS2 version instead) and I've had one other report of successful operation (toncho11, who posted various comments here in weeks past).

abzman commented 3 years ago

I've been working on other projects so I may not get to debugging this for a little while, I have two brand new keyboards to use with this but I have three others to try as well. I know the keyboards work, but I'm not hearing any beeping. My next test was to make sure my beeper circuit works. I'll let you know how it goes, I may try to bodge on a software serial port for debug messages

pkoning2 commented 3 years ago

Any news? Did you get it to work or are you still seeing problems?