|
|
|
|
|
by userbinator
422 days ago
|
|
This is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process. I find it amusing that the keyboard has a Windows key. Does anyone recognise what laptop it was originally from? It can't be a Thinkpad since there's no pointing stick, and I seem to remember some early Dells having a similar odd layout, but it's definitely an older one given the keys aren't islands. Odd placement of home/end and that right shift key aside, that actually looks better than most if not all laptop keyboards today (ins/del/home/end aren't Fn'd, and there's full-size arrow keys!) |
|
They keyboard is not from a laptop. It's a stand-alone PS/2 keyboard that I removed from its original enclosure and installed in the 3d printed enclosure for this computer. I get them from https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=561534245819&skuId=52612... (the "KJW240/10寸PS/2圆口(线长140cm" option). I cut the cord down to about 35cm, since the original cords are way too long, and crimp on a PH2.0 plug which plugs into the motherboard internally. Don't know whether or not you can buy this keyboard outside China. Maybe it's sold on AliExpress too. I tried out a lot of different keyboards before choosing this one. My criteria was pretty hard to meet: must have windows and menu keys, must have left and right shift keys (some keyboards actually don't have a right shift key!), must have both delete and backspace keys (some keyboards don't have a delete key), must have print screen scroll lock, numlock, number keypad (activated by numlock), pause/break, insert keys. Not many miniature modern keyboards actually have all those. It had to be small enough to fit on this computer but big enough to be able to type on fairly naturally. And it had to have pretty low power consumption. This keyboard takes about 6-7mA. Many keyboards I tried took between 30-40mA, more than the CPU itself. The thing I dislike most about this keyboard is the home key being between the quote and enter keys, and the up arrow key being where the right shift key should be. That's a really unfortunate design problem. But its a lot better than a lot of keyboards, and its something I was able to get pretty used to after a few days of typing. Still, I do plan to build my own keyboard to replace this in the future, one with a processor that sleeps between keystrokes so it can consume less than 1mA on average, and that has a standard key layout.
Since you can also plug in a PS/2 keyboard of your choice on the right side of the device, I had to consider the situation where someone plugs in an older keyboard that doesn't have the windows and menu keys. In that case they can use the F11 key to replace the windows key, and the F12 key to replace the menu key, as these two keys were not present on many keyboards and not used by software from the DOS era either.