WEBVTT

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this is the console 2624 a hall effect keyboard that was

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made all the way back in 1989 in the

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cssr the czechoslovak Soviet Socialist

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Republic using components from Tesla and

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it was deployed in places like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this thing

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doesn't glow does it not if we keep the lights on that's reassuring I've already

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got a lot of questions but the lab made that old Soviet Mouse work so so I'm

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guessing the answer to can I game on it is yes yeah you can and it's one of the

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best keyboards we've ever tested but also one of the worst we'll unpack that

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in a bit first I need a word for what

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this thing feels like wumpy here listen for

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yourself and listen to the segue to our sponsor next too say bonjour to the

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hello cam Pro and give your setup an upgrade with its 1080p res resolution 60

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FPS frame rate and Windows hello facial recognition you can learn more at the

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link in the video description our specimen here is a product of zuco Bruno

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or Bruno Armory first founded in 1918

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they made everything from rifles to cars

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to farming equipment and they have a soccer team named after them now anyway

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none of that matters for the moment what matters is getting it working and I

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suspect our first problem is going to be this connector they used a game Port

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well sort of it's the same da15 connector but in this case it's used for

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simple asynchronous serial Communications simple-ish this helpful

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post on deskthority keyboard Forum gave us some good pointers and as it turns

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out we only need to hook up six of the pins ground serial input and output both

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5 and negative2 volt power and finally a clock pulse does asynchronous cial

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normally need a clock pulse no ah so

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there's your ish a little more on that later for now

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according to Forum post we need to

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provide a square wave at 16 times the frequency or B rate okay oh but there's

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a recommended value wow I can't believe how easy this is turning out to

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be we just wire our connector up to a

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microcontroller like we did last time in this case a Raspberry Pi Pico that we've

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programmed to send the clock signal using timer upts and then read the

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serial data and spit it out over USB okay not super familiar with their

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alphabet but hey I know Numbers One MH

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two o x uh okay

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V uh it's pretty clear something's wrong

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because if this is how it worked I'm surprised Chernobyl lasted as long as it

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did time to do some digging we can see that different Keys produce the same

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output but to really understand what's at play here we're going to need to see

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the individual bits and hence you weren't kidding this is awesome Rhoden

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Schwarz has an asky mode that means that not only can we see the raw output but

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it actually shows us up at the top exactly which asy character it's

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supposed to correspond to of course as

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cool as this is that doesn't really fix anything so in order to do that we had

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to change the mode what are we looking at now so once we showed it all in

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binary we could very easily and Visually see that the first half of our data was

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varying as he presses different keys but the second half was not varying at all

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we had to figure out why this was happening interesting so that's how we

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compress two different keys and get exactly the same or a similar enough

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output that we get the same value that my friends is why electronics

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need to come with schematics it's like a breath of fresh air you guys if this

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keyboard was a tightly integrated modern device we'd pretty much be throwing it

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in the garbage but thanks to our comrades at Zaba Bruno we've got this a

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complete guide to the inner workings of our keyboard so all we need to do is

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work our way back from the connector to see what's going wrong this right here

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is our data output line and it comes from this green thing right here that is

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a uart chip which is short for universal asynchronous receiver transmitter in a

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nutshell it serializes incoming parallel

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data and then outputs it at a given frequency fun fact by the way there was

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a parallel version of this keyboard the 2423 that didn't have the uart at all

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and um would have saved us a lot of investigative work because we would have

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immediately noticed the problem when we read the raw data that half of every

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bite was locked to one but why well the

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input to the uart comes from these two Orange ic's right here these are rom

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chips that hold lookup tables if we Trace back one more step we get to the

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keyboard controller which takes its input from a pretty typical keyboard

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Matrix now we're all the way back let's go forward that Matrix gets translated

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by the keyboard controller into a 9bit parallel signal and a strobe signal that

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indicates a key has been pressed the nine bits go to our ROMs here and get

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translated into two halves of a single bite which the uart receives and

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then converts to serial once it sees the

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strobe signal it then sends that to the output or at least that's how it's

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supposed to happen as it turns out one of our ROM chips is just broken also

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wait a second nine bits ah I'm glad you

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asked see seven bits would give us 128

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values which is enough for a basic asking table or or whatever kind of asy

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table we're dealing with here then there's two bits for the modifiers which

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means four values and that turns out to be no modifier control shift and repeat

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wait repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat

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yes repeat okay guys that's enough sorry sorry see on most modern keyboards

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repeating is builtin so when you hold down a key it registers multiple key

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presses but on this one it's press once fire once no matter how long you hold it

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unless you also hold the repeat key the repeat key the repeat key we can

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actually see this in action if I just hold down the key takes a second to

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spool up but kind of has some interesting implications for gaming

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doesn't it if only we could get it working we can we just need to ignore

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the parts that don't work we just need to intercept these signals by wiring in

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our microcontroller before these broken ROM chips so they can't mess anything up

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we programmed the microcontroller with our own lookup tables based on the documentation we found and then the

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microcontroller just acts like a usb hid device are we ready now of course we

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just need the uh magnetic Cable Management Arch from LTT Store.com heck

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yeah it helps if you actually put it on the cable I

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did the one that we need this one's useless fair

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enough oh why do I have to use the Soviet Mouse

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too no I want a real Mouse maybe later

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but right now we need to try it with this oh it's so bad though

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the arrow keys are your movement not

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WD well where's anything got to look around there's the arrow keys up there

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they're line they work

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slowly what it works ever so slightly no

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that's not Zed or X that's Q well where are Zed and X you got to look around Zed

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God X

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nice oh oh no oh no come on a little bit

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too much so um because the keyboard only

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detects uh the pressing down the amount

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of time that the computer reads that you press the key uh is set by us so

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currently it's not really reading it very well okay well why did you do that

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I thought it' be funny

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come on okay can we change it higher yes we

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can change it thank you okay new attempt here we go this going

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to be way better right yep I changed the

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delay to 50 seconds instead of one 50 Mills okay shoot that was just

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user okay this is really unergonomic still but um this is this is totally

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usable so this is just essentially the the the polling rate that it's set to uh

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it's like how long uh the computer thinks the key is like held down and

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then let go so the signals are only sent

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when you like press a key not when you let go like a modern keyboard right so

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it's how long I tell the computer I'm

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pressing it you're pressing a key I am I don't think this is professional Tetris

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not very good at Tetris so that's good I thought I was doing bad okay look I am

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old oh you can't like press multiple things at once though it's very

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aren't you excited to play an FPS God

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no it changing the thing every time I rotate is driving me absolutely crazy

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okay what what is oh God this

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mouse I was like well I'm done with this game alt F there is no alt well there's

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no F keys there few how does this keyboard

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work f space is f pay respect to this

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keyboard why is it not going up you could just use the like arrow keys I'm

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going to have to play an FPS game Ariel going to

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try totally playable

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see you just got to press it a lot

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like oh and then it holds it down um

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wasn't doing this before uh uh uh C where's c c out of

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fuel um double

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okay can I have a real Mouse yeah this one right

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here all Oh Glory kill e yes yes yes yes

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yes okay still alive I'm not close enough come on E yes yes yes still alive

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oh no wait what can we do with

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teamwork okay so I'm going to hold the repeat key

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oh what is going oh right okay so I can't hold the repeat key when you space

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otherwise you're going to continuously jump oh we got to like let go at the

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right time yeah okay okay

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okay there we go get get over there get

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over come on come on go brother

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go now you have got to be asking yourself how could we say at the

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beginning of this video that this is the best of anything as it turns out it is

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one of the most consistent keyboards that we have ever tested on our robot

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that is to say that the actuation force and the travel distance is nearly

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identical from Key Tokey thanks in no small part to its 80 style solid steel

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back plane you got to love it of course

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if you're not pushing the key straight down right in the center you're going to

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have a pretty bad time uh let's just put it this

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way key stabilization has come a long

00:11:56.839 --> 00:12:02.560
way in the last uh 35 years years you

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know what else has come a long way my Segways to our sponsor manscaped Step

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00:13:05.360 --> 00:13:13.000
Soviet era Mouse working with a modern PC Ariel was so much younger back then