# Interfacing a PS/2 keyboard Serial connection through ACIA is nice, but you are probably plugging a modern computer on the other side of that ACIA, right? Let's go a step further away from those machines and drive a PS/2 keyboard directly! ## Goal Have a PS/2 keyboard drive the stdio input of the Collapse OS shell instead of the ACIA. **Status: work in progress** ## Gathering parts * A RC2014 Classic that could install the base recipe * A PS/2 keyboard. A USB keyboard + PS/2 adapter should work, but I haven't tried it yet. * A PS/2 female connector. Not so readily available, at least not on digikey. I de-soldered mine from an old motherboard I had laying around. * ATtiny85/45/25 (main MCU for the device) * 74xx595 (shift register) * 40106 inverter gates * Diodes for `A*`, `IORQ`, `RO`. * Proto board, RC2014 header pins, wires, IC sockets, etc. * [AVRA][avra] ## Building the PS/2 interface TODO. I have yet to draw presentable schematics. By reading `ps2ctl.asm`, you might be able to guess how things are wired up. It's rather straigtforward: the attiny reads serial data from PS/2 and then sends it to the 595. The 595 is wired straight to D7:0 with its `OE` wired to address selection + `IORQ` + `RO` ## Using the PS/2 interface After having built and flashed the `glue.asm` supplied with this recipe, you end up with a shell driven by the PS/2 keyboard (but it still outputs to ACIA). There are still a few glitches, especially at initialization or at connect and disconnect, but it otherwise works rather well! [avra]: https://github.com/hsoft/avra