this is the console 2624 a hall effect keyboard that was
made all the way back in 1989 in the
cssr the czechoslovak Soviet Socialist
Republic using components from Tesla and
it was deployed in places like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this thing
doesn't glow does it not if we keep the lights on that's reassuring I've already
got a lot of questions but the lab made that old Soviet Mouse work so so I'm
guessing the answer to can I game on it is yes yeah you can and it's one of the
best keyboards we've ever tested but also one of the worst we'll unpack that
in a bit first I need a word for what
this thing feels like wumpy here listen for
yourself and listen to the segue to our sponsor next too say bonjour to the
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link in the video description our specimen here is a product of zuco Bruno
or Bruno Armory first founded in 1918
they made everything from rifles to cars
to farming equipment and they have a soccer team named after them now anyway
none of that matters for the moment what matters is getting it working and I
suspect our first problem is going to be this connector they used a game Port
well sort of it's the same da15 connector but in this case it's used for
simple asynchronous serial Communications simple-ish this helpful
post on deskthority keyboard Forum gave us some good pointers and as it turns
out we only need to hook up six of the pins ground serial input and output both
5 and negative2 volt power and finally a clock pulse does asynchronous cial
normally need a clock pulse no ah so
there's your ish a little more on that later for now
according to Forum post we need to
provide a square wave at 16 times the frequency or B rate okay oh but there's
a recommended value wow I can't believe how easy this is turning out to
be we just wire our connector up to a
microcontroller like we did last time in this case a Raspberry Pi Pico that we've
programmed to send the clock signal using timer upts and then read the
serial data and spit it out over USB okay not super familiar with their
alphabet but hey I know Numbers One MH
two o x uh okay
V uh it's pretty clear something's wrong
because if this is how it worked I'm surprised Chernobyl lasted as long as it
did time to do some digging we can see that different Keys produce the same
output but to really understand what's at play here we're going to need to see
the individual bits and hence you weren't kidding this is awesome Rhoden
Schwarz has an asky mode that means that not only can we see the raw output but
it actually shows us up at the top exactly which asy character it's
supposed to correspond to of course as
cool as this is that doesn't really fix anything so in order to do that we had
to change the mode what are we looking at now so once we showed it all in
binary we could very easily and Visually see that the first half of our data was
varying as he presses different keys but the second half was not varying at all
we had to figure out why this was happening interesting so that's how we
compress two different keys and get exactly the same or a similar enough
output that we get the same value that my friends is why electronics
need to come with schematics it's like a breath of fresh air you guys if this
keyboard was a tightly integrated modern device we'd pretty much be throwing it
in the garbage but thanks to our comrades at Zaba Bruno we've got this a
complete guide to the inner workings of our keyboard so all we need to do is
work our way back from the connector to see what's going wrong this right here
is our data output line and it comes from this green thing right here that is
a uart chip which is short for universal asynchronous receiver transmitter in a
nutshell it serializes incoming parallel
data and then outputs it at a given frequency fun fact by the way there was
a parallel version of this keyboard the 2423 that didn't have the uart at all
and um would have saved us a lot of investigative work because we would have
immediately noticed the problem when we read the raw data that half of every
bite was locked to one but why well the
input to the uart comes from these two Orange ic's right here these are rom
chips that hold lookup tables if we Trace back one more step we get to the
keyboard controller which takes its input from a pretty typical keyboard
Matrix now we're all the way back let's go forward that Matrix gets translated
by the keyboard controller into a 9bit parallel signal and a strobe signal that
indicates a key has been pressed the nine bits go to our ROMs here and get
translated into two halves of a single bite which the uart receives and
then converts to serial once it sees the
strobe signal it then sends that to the output or at least that's how it's
supposed to happen as it turns out one of our ROM chips is just broken also
wait a second nine bits ah I'm glad you
asked see seven bits would give us 128
values which is enough for a basic asking table or or whatever kind of asy
table we're dealing with here then there's two bits for the modifiers which
means four values and that turns out to be no modifier control shift and repeat
wait repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat
yes repeat okay guys that's enough sorry sorry see on most modern keyboards
repeating is builtin so when you hold down a key it registers multiple key
presses but on this one it's press once fire once no matter how long you hold it
unless you also hold the repeat key the repeat key the repeat key we can
actually see this in action if I just hold down the key takes a second to
spool up but kind of has some interesting implications for gaming
doesn't it if only we could get it working we can we just need to ignore
the parts that don't work we just need to intercept these signals by wiring in
our microcontroller before these broken ROM chips so they can't mess anything up
we programmed the microcontroller with our own lookup tables based on the documentation we found and then the
microcontroller just acts like a usb hid device are we ready now of course we
just need the uh magnetic Cable Management Arch from LTT Store.com heck
yeah it helps if you actually put it on the cable I
did the one that we need this one's useless fair
enough oh why do I have to use the Soviet Mouse
too no I want a real Mouse maybe later
but right now we need to try it with this oh it's so bad though
the arrow keys are your movement not
WD well where's anything got to look around there's the arrow keys up there
they're line they work
slowly what it works ever so slightly no
that's not Zed or X that's Q well where are Zed and X you got to look around Zed
God X
nice oh oh no oh no come on a little bit
too much so um because the keyboard only
detects uh the pressing down the amount
of time that the computer reads that you press the key uh is set by us so
currently it's not really reading it very well okay well why did you do that
I thought it' be funny
come on okay can we change it higher yes we
can change it thank you okay new attempt here we go this going
to be way better right yep I changed the
delay to 50 seconds instead of one 50 Mills okay shoot that was just
user okay this is really unergonomic still but um this is this is totally
usable so this is just essentially the the the polling rate that it's set to uh
it's like how long uh the computer thinks the key is like held down and
then let go so the signals are only sent
when you like press a key not when you let go like a modern keyboard right so
it's how long I tell the computer I'm
pressing it you're pressing a key I am I don't think this is professional Tetris
not very good at Tetris so that's good I thought I was doing bad okay look I am
old oh you can't like press multiple things at once though it's very
aren't you excited to play an FPS God
no it changing the thing every time I rotate is driving me absolutely crazy
okay what what is oh God this
mouse I was like well I'm done with this game alt F there is no alt well there's
no F keys there few how does this keyboard
work f space is f pay respect to this
keyboard why is it not going up you could just use the like arrow keys I'm
going to have to play an FPS game Ariel going to
try totally playable
see you just got to press it a lot
like oh and then it holds it down um
wasn't doing this before uh uh uh C where's c c out of
fuel um double
okay can I have a real Mouse yeah this one right
here all Oh Glory kill e yes yes yes yes
yes okay still alive I'm not close enough come on E yes yes yes still alive
oh no wait what can we do with
teamwork okay so I'm going to hold the repeat key
oh what is going oh right okay so I can't hold the repeat key when you space
otherwise you're going to continuously jump oh we got to like let go at the
right time yeah okay okay
okay there we go get get over there get
over come on come on go brother
go now you have got to be asking yourself how could we say at the
beginning of this video that this is the best of anything as it turns out it is
one of the most consistent keyboards that we have ever tested on our robot
that is to say that the actuation force and the travel distance is nearly
identical from Key Tokey thanks in no small part to its 80 style solid steel
back plane you got to love it of course
if you're not pushing the key straight down right in the center you're going to
have a pretty bad time uh let's just put it this
way key stabilization has come a long
way in the last uh 35 years years you
know what else has come a long way my Segways to our sponsor manscaped Step
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free shipping if you guys liked this video check out the time we got an old
Soviet era Mouse working with a modern PC Ariel was so much younger back then