Posted by
chrisd
on from the click-smack-click-smack dept.
graymalkn writes "My wife has repetitive stress problems and prefers typing on old-fashioned mechanical typewriters. For Christmas, I converted a mechanical typewriter to work as a computer keyboard. My favorite feature: slap the carriage return for Enter."
the typewriter-keyboard conversion
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, it really works. Even down to slapping the carriage return for Enter.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that...
The first thing to do was take apart a regular keyboard and figure out how it worked.
The little circuit board there has two sets of thirteen terminals. A keypress is registered when a circuit is completed between one terminal from the left set and one terminal from the right set. All the rest in a keyboard is just a matter of getting the circuit to the right place.
So I started out by mapping all the connections from each terminal to each other terminal. I did this by plugging the circuit board into my laptop, clipping one end of the aligator clip to a terminal and touching the other end to every other terminal. Most of the conections produced nothing at all or perhaps a beep, but sometimes a letter would pop up and I would record which two terminals were connected. This allowed me to make a chart of the entire keyboard for later use
The first trick with the actual typewriter was to get all the regular keys to produce letters. Shift, Space, and Enter I would worry about later.
A quick look at the underside of the typewriter provided the answer.
Every time a key is pressed, the "lever" is pushed down and connects with the "crossbar" (the other end of the lever raises the hammer to strike the paper). The crossbar seems to both keep the levers from moving too far and provide the force to advance the carriage for the next letter.
So I figured I could use the contact there to complete a circuit. Obviously, each lever and each part of the crossbar that it would contact would have to be electrically insulated. Then I would need something to act as the actual contact. For insulation I used gaffer's tape, which worked admirably. For the contact patches I initially tried aluminum foil but was having a bit of trouble soldering the wire to it. I spoke to my fencing coach, who has plenty of electrical soldering experience. He told me that you simply can't solder to aluminum but offered me a rather interesting bit of material: copper lamé with an electrically conductive adhesive on the back, which I did not even know existed. The stuff is perfect for repairing fencing lamés and seemed to be just what I needed. He got it from a former student who said it was manufactured my a rival electronics comapny and he had never seen it in stores. This leant a certain mystique to the project- working with rare and somewhat mysterious material and so forth.
My first thought was to simply put the wire under the lamé and let the adhesive conduct and hold it in place, but the adhesive wasn't strong enough to keep the wires from moving around. It would have held for a while, but I needed something I could really move around, so I decided it would have to be soldered in place.
After removing the crossbar and covering it with gaffer's tape, I replaced it in the typewriter and used a silver glitter pen (you can tell this was a labour of love) to mark exactly where each hammer touched it. Then I cut triangular strips of lamé and stuck them on over the contact areas. I used alternating triangles so that each one could have some spot large enough to solder the wire in place- the even ones on one side, odd on the other.
Next up were the levers themselves. Oy, what a job. Each lever was wrapped first in gaffer's tape then in lamé. Soldering onto this lamé material works, but the problem is that the stuff is so thin that is burns/melts really easily, so any more than a minute touch of the soldering iron would put a hole in it and I would have to start again.
From here I returned to the crossbar, soldering on wires (this illustration shows only one side done).
Once this was done, it was just a matter of putting it all together. But first: the special keys.
Enter
I knew from the start that I wanted my wife to be able to hit Enter by slapping the carriage return, so as to reproduce as closely as possible the feeling of actually typing on a typewriter (which you can still do on this thing, by the way- it is still fully functional as a typewriter). Took me forever to figure out how to do it, and even then I kind of cheated.
What I finally settled on is a mechanism on the carriage itself that is responsible for dinging a bell when the typist reaches the end of a line. There is a small "hammer" that is pulled right (in this illustration) across the "anvil" when the end of a line is reached (I don't know what the hell these things are really called, so I'm just making these terms up). The anvil strikes the bell, shown through the hole in the lower left. After this is done and the end of the line is reached, the carriage comes to rest as shown in the illustration. When the carriage return is slapped, the hammer moves gently across the anvil, going in the other direction (the hammer is on a spring, so it can pivot counterclockwise around the screw shown).
I wrapped the anvil in gaffer's tape and lamè and soldered a wire to it. The trouble was the hammer. I finally gave up on attaching a wire to it, as it would be almost impossible to keep it from getting jammed in the carriage, which would be moving back and forth all the time. So I cheated- the circuit for Enter is dependant not on two pieces of lamè touching, but on one bit of lamè touching the metal frame itself, in ths case the bare hammer. I figured it would be OK: since every other wire had to be insulated from the frame anyway, it would be no more likely to cause an error than any two regular key circuits accidentally touching the frame.
After wraping the backside of the hammer in gaffer's tape so it wouldn't close the circuit when it rang the bell (which still works), all I had to do was solder a bit of wire to the frame and I was set. In case there was ever any trouble with this perhaps precarious mechanism, I also wired the key on the typewriter to act as a backup Enter.
Space
The spacebar was pretty simple, as there was a spot underneath where it struck a rubber pad. All I had to do was make the usual gaffer's tape-lamè-wire contacts and it was ready.
Shift Shift was a bit tricky. That is, it was easy to plan but because of the tight space and awkward angles it took a bit of doing to execute. Basically it was the same sort of contact, but this time wrapped around the bar that the "Shift Lock" mechanism locks on to. Unfortunately, I had to wrap the locking mechanism in gaffer's tape to prevent a circuit from forming with the frame, and this made it unable to actually lock the shift mechanism around the bar (wrapped in gaf tape and lamé).
My only real regret on this project is that I never found a way to make the Backspace key work, since the mechanism that controls it is deep inside the typewriter, far to deep to get to without risking disaster.
The next task was to solder wires onto the terminals of the circuit board left over from the keyboard. This was a nightmare- each one was maybe two milimeters from the next so getting the solder to stay on just one was a task in itself. Then I found that a few of the wires had lifted the conductor right off the board so I had to scrape off the green insulation a little further up the circuit to redo it (the diagonal one in the illustration), like a junkie looking for a new vein. And half the time fixing one solder job would heat the one next to it enough for it to come loose. Ah, memories...
A few words of advice for anyone trying this themselves: use electronics solder- it doesn't stick to breadboard. I later got curious and tested regular solder on an old NIC and it stuck everywhere. Watch what you buy.
At this point there were wires coming from the crossbar, wires coming from the levers, and wires coming from the circuit board. Time to connect them.
Like I said earlier, each key is a connection between two terminals. Some terminals have lots of keys connected to them. For example, connecting terminal 4 and terminal 19 might produce "A" but connecting terminal 9 and terminal 19 might produce "F". Since 1-13 always connected to 14-26 and vice versa (i.e. no terminal from 1 to 13 connects to any other terminal from 1 to 13), I arbitrarily decided that the levers would all connect to 1-13 and the crossbar would connect to 14-26. Next I physically grouped all the wires by terminal, so that everything going to terminal 1 would be bundled together, everything to 2 would be together, etc. and labeled the bundles with masking tape and a marker.
By the way, should you ever do this yourself, it would be handy to start off by marking on the underside of the typewriter which lever coresponds to which key. I thought of this rather late. Duh.
With all the wires bundled, it was time to connect them to their corresponding wires from the circuit board. These were crudely soldered and covered with shrink-tubing or, when I forgot to put on the tubing first, more gaffer's tape.
Fortuitously, the circuitboard fit nicely in a little space at the back of the typewriter. I made a little insulated nest of gaffer's tape and slid it in, where it fit perfectly- nice and snug. One more round of gaf tape to hold it in place...
and it was DONE. We don't talk about the several hours I spent troubleshooting it after it was declared done, including the stuck C key on Christmas morning. Ahem.
Re:That's wierd
by
stefanlasiewski
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Hard typing can lead to RSI.
From the page:
she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards
Different keyboards work for different people. If you're used to typing on a Smith-Corona, I can definatly see how the "hitting a wall" can hurt your fingers.
-- "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
origin of the "windows key"
by
SHEENmaster
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· Score: 3, Informative
it actually started on the early Apple computers as Open Apple and Closed Apple then moved to Command for the ADB(Apple Desktop Bus) keyboards of the macintoshes.
As for Linux support, the command keys on my Linux iBook work the same way as the winshit key (whiteouted of course) on my Linux server.
It looks as if he is connecting this typewriter to an older (pre usb switchover) macintosh, but I haven't found a specific quote to that effect.
-- You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Where to buy old Style IBM Keyboards
by
Deathlizard
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· Score: 5, Informative
http://www.pckeyboard.com/
They made the original IBM keyboards and they still make them.
fundamentals of RSI
by
trance9
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· Score: 5, Informative
This just needs to be said:
1. A new keyboard isn't a good solution to an RSI problem. The only good solution is to type less. Changing your keyboard may "feel" better for awhile because you will be stressing different muscles. But you will still be stressing muscles and unless you make a fundamental change the problem will come back again.
2. Posture matters more than anything else. Perhaps with "more resistence" you are forced into a better posture. A good typing posture leaves your arms free so that all of the muscles through your arms, shoulders, and even back can come into play while you type. By distributing the work throughout as many different muscle groups as you can you eliminate the stress on each muscle.
3. You stress your muscles even when you are not typing, just by sitting in the "typing position" you are creating stress. It takes work to hold your fingers ready over the home row, and if you don't get a break from that, that alone can contribute to your RSI.
I had two rounds with RSI problems and I'll tell you how I solved it--today I'm seemingly healthy again. I tried all kinds of different keyboards, mouses, workstation arrangements, etc., but only the fundamentals worked in the end.
My first round at RSI I won by changing the fundamentals: I drastically cut the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer by giving up video games completely. Nothing else worked, but cutting the time I spent in front of a computer in half made a difference.
My second round with RSI was more difficult to beat, I had to change my attitude. First I took a two month hiatus from touching computers--I was consulting, so I simply stopped consulting for awhile until I felt normal again. When I returned I tried to make some changes, like altering my keyboard, and I failed. Back to another two month break. In the end I had to learn to get up and leave my workstation every so often--anywhere from 15 minutes to 30min, and just go for a little walk around the office. I also had to learn that no matter how pressing my deadlines were, if I didn't feel right, it was time to go home.
It took me a LONG time to change my work attitudes, so that I no longer sat in front of a computer for too many hours, or worked too much in a day. I learned to think while walking around the room rather than sitting at my desk, I learned to take more breaks, and these are FUNDAMENTAL things that matter--changing your keyboard is a minor factor at best.
Before I recovered I'd lost a total of five months to long breaks required to get me back to a healthy state. I was paranoid about it, I stopped on pain and took long breaks--many people feel work pressure and try to find ways to work through the pain, I just gave it up. I figured that although I suffered financially at the time (and still feel some effects of that) it was more important to me to have a long and full career in the future.
I've had things pretty well under control for the past five years now, but it takes dedication and paranoia and you have to grow a pretty serious attitude about it.
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
Re:fundamentals of RSI
by
jcsehak
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· Score: 5, Informative
Very informative; thanks. Let me add to it:
If your problem is not with the keyboard, but with the mouse, an easy solution that cuts your pain in half is to simply learn to mouse with your off-hand. It's so obvious, it's easy to overlook. That way, when one starts to hurt, just switch over. Of course, this is irrelevant to typists.
Also, guitarists have had this problem sinch before keyboards were invented. Stretches for the guitarist are equally useful to the computer scientist.
It seemed a little sluggish, so here's a mirror. Be gentle with it.
Re:That's wierd
by
Tablizer
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· Score: 2, Informative
Different keyboards work for different people. If you're used to typing on a Smith-Corona, I can definatly see how the "hitting a wall" can hurt your fingers.
The theory seems sound (pun): If you can rely on the click sound, then your ears serve as the feedback mechanism instead of your fingers. IOW, use audio feedback *instead of* physical (pressure) feedback. Appearently the person at issue has learned to use their ears for feedback. Perhaps most of us got too used to the pressure feedback, which is perhaps a big risk to RMI.
Re:I had a wonderful old IBM like that...
by
Urchlay
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· Score: 3, Informative
You can find the good IBM keyboards at thrift stores, swap meets, hamfests, used computer dealers, computer salvage yards.. usually for under $5 (hell, usually for under $2).
The good ones are called the `IBM Model M', and they have real springs under the keys. More info at http://modelm.org
I personally own about 50 or 60 of these, but you can't have any of them (they're my lifetime supply of keyboards. Yes, you can use a PS/2 => USB adaptor with them, so they should work on new hardware for many years to come). I've managed to break only one Model M in my life... well actually my old boss did, he dumped a 16oz. Starbuck's coffee with extra cream & sugar directly into it, and I didn't find out about it until it had had time to congeal.. probably I could have salvaged it by running it through the dishwasher, but it was starting to draw flies, so I decided it was dead...
Just hit the thrift shops, you'll find them...
Re:You forgot the escape key!
by
idiot900
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ctrl-[ is equivalent to Esc, and even saves a little bit of time compared to having to move your left hand all the way up to Esc.
Re:It goes without saying...
by
BigBlockMopar
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· Score: 5, Informative
...that this guy should learn how to solder.
Sorry. But this is simultaneously an amazing project and an act of butchery.
A few words of advice for anyone trying this themselves: use electronics solder- it doesn't stick to breadboard. I later got curious and tested regular solder on an old NIC and it stuck everywhere. Watch what you buy.
"Regular solder"? Is that plumber's solder, like you'd use to sweat two pipes together?
Solder includes chemicals (flux) which help to clean the pieces of metal which are being attached. Electronic solder is either rosin core or organic core; they're fairly gentle. Acid core is used by plumbers and the post-soldering remains of the flux attack electronic components over the years.
Based on some of the pictures, I believe that the soldering to the PC board was done with an overly-large soldering iron. A fine grounded-tip 15-25W soldering iron is *essential*. My favorites are the tiny little Ungar irons from just before Weller bought them out.
BTW, it *is* possible to solder to aluminum, but it's very different. For one thing, aluminum coats itself almost instantly with a very fine layer of very hard aluminum oxide. Solder will not stick to this layer. The other problem is that aluminum conducts heat away from the attempted soldered connection. A large-wattage iron with a sharpened tip will do the trick. Apply a puddle of solder and, scrape the aluminum under the puddle with the tip of the hot iron. A bond will form, and the strength will be mostly dependent on how well you scraped the aluminum under the puddle.
Gaffer tape has a tendency to dry out, shrink and peel off over time. This limits the longevity of this particular modification. Of course, you probably don't want to cut up the typewriter since you chose it because you like it, and they don't make 'em anymore, so I applaud the reversibility.
Rather than attempting to make a distinct "switch" for each button, why not simply have a scheme where each keypress will ground a wire to the crossbar? Of course, that won't work with the keyboard's matrix arrangement, but that can be easily solved in a minute.
PC board looks like a good way to insulate parts of your switch assemblies, since it's cheap, readily-available, easy to work with, and you can use it to make narrow switches.
Onto each one of the levers (which are steel) you could solder a small piece of printed circuit board with a custom pattern. (You can buy printed circuit board etching supplies at Radio Shack.) One part of this tiny board's pattern is used to solder it to the lever. Then a gap, with no copper on the board. The opposite end of this pattern is a place to which you can solder a flexible wire and a small fold of some springy nickel-plated steel.
The tiny board then rides with the lever and the new springy-steel contact then connects the wire to the crossbar.
As for connecting the keyboard to the matrix, my first thought is to use optocouplers. Optocouplers are merely an LED and a photocell built into the same case. They're meant to isolate different parts of electronic circuits.
Solder a piece of flexible wire to the crossbar, and connect that directly to the keyboard's ground on the PS/2 or DIN connector. (You can get the pinout from the Internet.) Take the +5V lead from the keyboard and put about a 500 ohm resistor in series with it, then carry that across to the anodes of the LEDs in the optocouplers. Connect each cathode to each wire coming off the lever boards. Now, when you hit a key, the LED in the corresponding optocoupler should be lit.
The photocell in an optocoupler is actually a kind of transistor, which is essentially an electronic switch. Connect each optocoupler to its corresponding pair of contacts on the keyboard's matrix. Make sure you get the polarity right, a quick check of the keyboard with a voltmeter should do it.
Choose an optocoupler with a good transfer characteristic; probably Darlington-outputs. LEDs need current limiting, and that's what the 500 ohm resistor is for. Now, there's ONE resistor being used to power all those LEDs in the optocoupler, and it limits the single or total LED current to 10mA. This is done because motherboards often have fuses to keep keyboard current below about 50mA. Even if you hold down all the keys on the keyboard, you will not draw more than 10mA. Blowing the keyboard fuse on your motherboard would suck.
Now, when the Smithsonian comes calling and wants your typewriter because FDR used to keep it in the trunk of the Presidential Limo? Desolder the wire from the crossbar, desolder all the little pieces of printed circuit board from the levers, and the typewriter is undamaged.
sources for copper tape
by
Tekmage
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· Score: 3, Informative
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I did some stained-glass creative stuff at school... To solder the panes together, you had to wrap the edges of the pieces of glass with strips of sticky copper tape. From the description of the lame tape (so thin that it burns/melts really easily), the stained-glass stuff may be a better (future) option.
A search for "stained glass copper tape" on Google turns up a few sources.
-- --The more you know, the less you know.
Re:Big mistake
by
Graymalkn
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ah, but did you notice that I blurred out all identifying info on the deposit slips? I'm not *that* sloppy!
Erik
--
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
Re:What about the 1 key?
by
prockcore
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· Score: 3, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it really works. Even down to slapping the carriage return for Enter.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that...
The first thing to do was take apart a regular keyboard and figure out how it worked.
The little circuit board there has two sets of thirteen terminals. A keypress is registered when a circuit is completed between one terminal from the left set and one terminal from the right set. All the rest in a keyboard is just a matter of getting the circuit to the right place.
So I started out by mapping all the connections from each terminal to each other terminal. I did this by plugging the circuit board into my laptop, clipping one end of the aligator clip to a terminal and touching the other end to every other terminal. Most of the conections produced nothing at all or perhaps a beep, but sometimes a letter would pop up and I would record which two terminals were connected. This allowed me to make a chart of the entire keyboard for later use
The first trick with the actual typewriter was to get all the regular keys to produce letters. Shift, Space, and Enter I would worry about later.
A quick look at the underside of the typewriter provided the answer.
Every time a key is pressed, the "lever" is pushed down and connects with the "crossbar" (the other end of the lever raises the hammer to strike the paper). The crossbar seems to both keep the levers from moving too far and provide the force to advance the carriage for the next letter.
So I figured I could use the contact there to complete a circuit. Obviously, each lever and each part of the crossbar that it would contact would have to be electrically insulated. Then I would need something to act as the actual contact. For insulation I used gaffer's tape, which worked admirably. For the contact patches I initially tried aluminum foil but was having a bit of trouble soldering the wire to it. I spoke to my fencing coach, who has plenty of electrical soldering experience. He told me that you simply can't solder to aluminum but offered me a rather interesting bit of material: copper lamé with an electrically conductive adhesive on the back, which I did not even know existed. The stuff is perfect for repairing fencing lamés and seemed to be just what I needed. He got it from a former student who said it was manufactured my a rival electronics comapny and he had never seen it in stores. This leant a certain mystique to the project- working with rare and somewhat mysterious material and so forth.
My first thought was to simply put the wire under the lamé and let the adhesive conduct and hold it in place, but the adhesive wasn't strong enough to keep the wires from moving around. It would have held for a while, but I needed something I could really move around, so I decided it would have to be soldered in place.
After removing the crossbar and covering it with gaffer's tape, I replaced it in the typewriter and used a silver glitter pen (you can tell this was a labour of love) to mark exactly where each hammer touched it. Then I cut triangular strips of lamé and stuck them on over the contact areas. I used alternating triangles so that each one could have some spot large enough to solder the wire in place- the even ones on one side, odd on the other.
Next up were the levers themselves. Oy, what a job. Each lever was wrapped first in gaffer's tape then in lamé. Soldering onto this lamé material works, but the problem is that the stuff is so thin that is burns/melts really easily, so any more than a minute touch of the soldering iron would put a hole in it and I would have to start again.
From here I returned to the crossbar, soldering on wires (this illustration shows only one side done).
Once this was done, it was just a matter of putting it all together. But first: the special keys.
Enter
I knew from the start that I wanted my wife to be able to hit Enter by slapping the carriage return, so as to reproduce as closely as possible the feeling of actually typing on a typewriter (which you can still do on this thing, by the way- it is still fully functional as a typewriter). Took me forever to figure out how to do it, and even then I kind of cheated.
What I finally settled on is a mechanism on the carriage itself that is responsible for dinging a bell when the typist reaches the end of a line. There is a small "hammer" that is pulled right (in this illustration) across the "anvil" when the end of a line is reached (I don't know what the hell these things are really called, so I'm just making these terms up). The anvil strikes the bell, shown through the hole in the lower left. After this is done and the end of the line is reached, the carriage comes to rest as shown in the illustration. When the carriage return is slapped, the hammer moves gently across the anvil, going in the other direction (the hammer is on a spring, so it can pivot counterclockwise around the screw shown).
I wrapped the anvil in gaffer's tape and lamè and soldered a wire to it. The trouble was the hammer. I finally gave up on attaching a wire to it, as it would be almost impossible to keep it from getting jammed in the carriage, which would be moving back and forth all the time. So I cheated- the circuit for Enter is dependant not on two pieces of lamè touching, but on one bit of lamè touching the metal frame itself, in ths case the bare hammer. I figured it would be OK: since every other wire had to be insulated from the frame anyway, it would be no more likely to cause an error than any two regular key circuits accidentally touching the frame.
After wraping the backside of the hammer in gaffer's tape so it wouldn't close the circuit when it rang the bell (which still works), all I had to do was solder a bit of wire to the frame and I was set. In case there was ever any trouble with this perhaps precarious mechanism, I also wired the key on the typewriter to act as a backup Enter.
Space
The spacebar was pretty simple, as there was a spot underneath where it struck a rubber pad. All I had to do was make the usual gaffer's tape-lamè-wire contacts and it was ready.
Shift
Shift was a bit tricky. That is, it was easy to plan but because of the tight space and awkward angles it took a bit of doing to execute. Basically it was the same sort of contact, but this time wrapped around the bar that the "Shift Lock" mechanism locks on to. Unfortunately, I had to wrap the locking mechanism in gaffer's tape to prevent a circuit from forming with the frame, and this made it unable to actually lock the shift mechanism around the bar (wrapped in gaf tape and lamé).
My only real regret on this project is that I never found a way to make the Backspace key work, since the mechanism that controls it is deep inside the typewriter, far to deep to get to without risking disaster.
The next task was to solder wires onto the terminals of the circuit board left over from the keyboard. This was a nightmare- each one was maybe two milimeters from the next so getting the solder to stay on just one was a task in itself. Then I found that a few of the wires had lifted the conductor right off the board so I had to scrape off the green insulation a little further up the circuit to redo it (the diagonal one in the illustration), like a junkie looking for a new vein. And half the time fixing one solder job would heat the one next to it enough for it to come loose. Ah, memories...
A few words of advice for anyone trying this themselves: use electronics solder- it doesn't stick to breadboard. I later got curious and tested regular solder on an old NIC and it stuck everywhere. Watch what you buy.
At this point there were wires coming from the crossbar, wires coming from the levers, and wires coming from the circuit board. Time to connect them.
Like I said earlier, each key is a connection between two terminals. Some terminals have lots of keys connected to them. For example, connecting terminal 4 and terminal 19 might produce "A" but connecting terminal 9 and terminal 19 might produce "F". Since 1-13 always connected to 14-26 and vice versa (i.e. no terminal from 1 to 13 connects to any other terminal from 1 to 13), I arbitrarily decided that the levers would all connect to 1-13 and the crossbar would connect to 14-26. Next I physically grouped all the wires by terminal, so that everything going to terminal 1 would be bundled together, everything to 2 would be together, etc. and labeled the bundles with masking tape and a marker.
By the way, should you ever do this yourself, it would be handy to start off by marking on the underside of the typewriter which lever coresponds to which key. I thought of this rather late. Duh.
With all the wires bundled, it was time to connect them to their corresponding wires from the circuit board. These were crudely soldered and covered with shrink-tubing or, when I forgot to put on the tubing first, more gaffer's tape.
Fortuitously, the circuitboard fit nicely in a little space at the back of the typewriter. I made a little insulated nest of gaffer's tape and slid it in, where it fit perfectly- nice and snug. One more round of gaf tape to hold it in place...
and it was DONE. We don't talk about the several hours I spent troubleshooting it after it was declared done, including the stuck C key on Christmas morning. Ahem.
Hard typing can lead to RSI.
From the page:
she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards
Different keyboards work for different people. If you're used to typing on a Smith-Corona, I can definatly see how the "hitting a wall" can hurt your fingers.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
it actually started on the early Apple computers as Open Apple and Closed Apple then moved to Command for the ADB(Apple Desktop Bus) keyboards of the macintoshes.
As for Linux support, the command keys on my Linux iBook work the same way as the winshit key (whiteouted of course) on my Linux server.
It looks as if he is connecting this typewriter to an older (pre usb switchover) macintosh, but I haven't found a specific quote to that effect.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
http://www.pckeyboard.com/
They made the original IBM keyboards and they still make them.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
This just needs to be said:
1. A new keyboard isn't a good solution to an RSI problem. The only good solution is to type less. Changing your keyboard may "feel" better for awhile because you will be stressing different muscles. But you will still be stressing muscles and unless you make a fundamental change the problem will come back again.
2. Posture matters more than anything else. Perhaps with "more resistence" you are forced into a better posture. A good typing posture leaves your arms free so that all of the muscles through your arms, shoulders, and even back can come into play while you type. By distributing the work throughout as many different muscle groups as you can you eliminate the stress on each muscle.
3. You stress your muscles even when you are not typing, just by sitting in the "typing position" you are creating stress. It takes work to hold your fingers ready over the home row, and if you don't get a break from that, that alone can contribute to your RSI.
I had two rounds with RSI problems and I'll tell you how I solved it--today I'm seemingly healthy again. I tried all kinds of different keyboards, mouses, workstation arrangements, etc., but only the fundamentals worked in the end.
My first round at RSI I won by changing the fundamentals: I drastically cut the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer by giving up video games completely. Nothing else worked, but cutting the time I spent in front of a computer in half made a difference.
My second round with RSI was more difficult to beat, I had to change my attitude. First I took a two month hiatus from touching computers--I was consulting, so I simply stopped consulting for awhile until I felt normal again. When I returned I tried to make some changes, like altering my keyboard, and I failed. Back to another two month break. In the end I had to learn to get up and leave my workstation every so often--anywhere from 15 minutes to 30min, and just go for a little walk around the office. I also had to learn that no matter how pressing my deadlines were, if I didn't feel right, it was time to go home.
It took me a LONG time to change my work attitudes, so that I no longer sat in front of a computer for too many hours, or worked too much in a day. I learned to think while walking around the room rather than sitting at my desk, I learned to take more breaks, and these are FUNDAMENTAL things that matter--changing your keyboard is a minor factor at best.
Before I recovered I'd lost a total of five months to long breaks required to get me back to a healthy state. I was paranoid about it, I stopped on pain and took long breaks--many people feel work pressure and try to find ways to work through the pain, I just gave it up. I figured that although I suffered financially at the time (and still feel some effects of that) it was more important to me to have a long and full career in the future.
I've had things pretty well under control for the past five years now, but it takes dedication and paranoia and you have to grow a pretty serious attitude about it.
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
It seemed a little sluggish, so here's a mirror. Be gentle with it.
Different keyboards work for different people. If you're used to typing on a Smith-Corona, I can definatly see how the "hitting a wall" can hurt your fingers.
The theory seems sound (pun): If you can rely on the click sound, then your ears serve as the feedback mechanism instead of your fingers. IOW, use audio feedback *instead of* physical (pressure) feedback. Appearently the person at issue has learned to use their ears for feedback. Perhaps most of us got too used to the pressure feedback, which is perhaps a big risk to RMI.
Table-ized A.I.
You can find the good IBM keyboards at thrift stores, swap meets, hamfests, used computer dealers, computer salvage yards.. usually for under $5 (hell, usually for under $2).
The good ones are called the `IBM Model M', and they have real springs under the keys. More info at http://modelm.org
I personally own about 50 or 60 of these, but you can't have any of them (they're my lifetime supply of keyboards. Yes, you can use a PS/2 => USB adaptor with them, so they should work on new hardware for many years to come). I've managed to break only one Model M in my life... well actually my old boss did, he dumped a 16oz. Starbuck's coffee with extra cream & sugar directly into it, and I didn't find out about it until it had had time to congeal.. probably I could have salvaged it by running it through the dishwasher, but it was starting to draw flies, so I decided it was dead...
Just hit the thrift shops, you'll find them...
Ctrl-[ is equivalent to Esc, and even saves a little bit of time compared to having to move your left hand all the way up to Esc.
...that this guy should learn how to solder.
Sorry. But this is simultaneously an amazing project and an act of butchery.
A few words of advice for anyone trying this themselves: use electronics solder- it doesn't stick to breadboard. I later got curious and tested regular solder on an old NIC and it stuck everywhere. Watch what you buy."Regular solder"? Is that plumber's solder, like you'd use to sweat two pipes together?
Solder includes chemicals (flux) which help to clean the pieces of metal which are being attached. Electronic solder is either rosin core or organic core; they're fairly gentle. Acid core is used by plumbers and the post-soldering remains of the flux attack electronic components over the years.
Based on some of the pictures, I believe that the soldering to the PC board was done with an overly-large soldering iron. A fine grounded-tip 15-25W soldering iron is *essential*. My favorites are the tiny little Ungar irons from just before Weller bought them out.
BTW, it *is* possible to solder to aluminum, but it's very different. For one thing, aluminum coats itself almost instantly with a very fine layer of very hard aluminum oxide. Solder will not stick to this layer. The other problem is that aluminum conducts heat away from the attempted soldered connection. A large-wattage iron with a sharpened tip will do the trick. Apply a puddle of solder and, scrape the aluminum under the puddle with the tip of the hot iron. A bond will form, and the strength will be mostly dependent on how well you scraped the aluminum under the puddle.
Gaffer tape has a tendency to dry out, shrink and peel off over time. This limits the longevity of this particular modification. Of course, you probably don't want to cut up the typewriter since you chose it because you like it, and they don't make 'em anymore, so I applaud the reversibility.
Rather than attempting to make a distinct "switch" for each button, why not simply have a scheme where each keypress will ground a wire to the crossbar? Of course, that won't work with the keyboard's matrix arrangement, but that can be easily solved in a minute.
PC board looks like a good way to insulate parts of your switch assemblies, since it's cheap, readily-available, easy to work with, and you can use it to make narrow switches.
Onto each one of the levers (which are steel) you could solder a small piece of printed circuit board with a custom pattern. (You can buy printed circuit board etching supplies at Radio Shack.) One part of this tiny board's pattern is used to solder it to the lever. Then a gap, with no copper on the board. The opposite end of this pattern is a place to which you can solder a flexible wire and a small fold of some springy nickel-plated steel.
The tiny board then rides with the lever and the new springy-steel contact then connects the wire to the crossbar.
As for connecting the keyboard to the matrix, my first thought is to use optocouplers. Optocouplers are merely an LED and a photocell built into the same case. They're meant to isolate different parts of electronic circuits.
Solder a piece of flexible wire to the crossbar, and connect that directly to the keyboard's ground on the PS/2 or DIN connector. (You can get the pinout from the Internet.) Take the +5V lead from the keyboard and put about a 500 ohm resistor in series with it, then carry that across to the anodes of the LEDs in the optocouplers. Connect each cathode to each wire coming off the lever boards. Now, when you hit a key, the LED in the corresponding optocoupler should be lit.
The photocell in an optocoupler is actually a kind of transistor, which is essentially an electronic switch. Connect each optocoupler to its corresponding pair of contacts on the keyboard's matrix. Make sure you get the polarity right, a quick check of the keyboard with a voltmeter should do it.
Choose an optocoupler with a good transfer characteristic; probably Darlington-outputs. LEDs need current limiting, and that's what the 500 ohm resistor is for. Now, there's ONE resistor being used to power all those LEDs in the optocoupler, and it limits the single or total LED current to 10mA. This is done because motherboards often have fuses to keep keyboard current below about 50mA. Even if you hold down all the keys on the keyboard, you will not draw more than 10mA. Blowing the keyboard fuse on your motherboard would suck.
Now, when the Smithsonian comes calling and wants your typewriter because FDR used to keep it in the trunk of the Presidential Limo? Desolder the wire from the crossbar, desolder all the little pieces of printed circuit board from the levers, and the typewriter is undamaged.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I did some stained-glass creative stuff at school... To solder the panes together, you had to wrap the edges of the pieces of glass with strips of sticky copper tape. From the description of the lame tape (so thin that it burns/melts really easily), the stained-glass stuff may be a better (future) option.
A search for "stained glass copper tape" on Google turns up a few sources.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Ah, but did you notice that I blurred out all identifying info on the deposit slips? I'm not *that* sloppy!
Erik
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
http://www.multipledigression.com/typewriter/pics/ pages/type10.htm
Yup. looking at that picture, there's definately no '1' key.