Question about keyboard for cnc build

BeagleBrainz wrote: Can out get physical access to the row\col of the keyboard matrix ? if so a 7i73 could be the answer if you are going the MESA route of a custom USB solution, Arduino ProMicro or another mcu that has native USB.
Or as per your solution an MCU reading the serial and connecting via USB.

Any pics of the guts of the device ?

I do have pics, but it's basically a PIC, a serial interface etc. The keyboard is of course a row/col matrix, but the hardware is doing just fine. The serial interface works perfectly - the cable etc is a regular one, and I've got a couple of serial interfaces on the industrial PC's that I use.

The only real question is how I can get the ASCII from the serial interface and into LinuxCNC.

It would seem one option is to somehow get it to appear as a serial keyboard (well, it basically is a traditional serial keyboard!) and then use HAL_input to access the input device. As that seems a bit hokey and going to require building kernel drivers etc (there's got to be something out there already?!), the easiest options are:

a) a standalone python script that uses the linuxcnc module, and listens to the serial interface. It can then be mapped to pins accordingly - I do need to figure out how to interact with the Axis UI (ie flipping between menus), but I can always extend Axis to use pins to determine the menu to show etc.

b) an extension menu/module for Axis using python - pretty much as above, but run as a menu/integral script.

Not a big job really, but it's figuring the most lazy/efficient way of getting the ASCII characters into the right place. Nicely, the keyboard generates both keydown and keyup characters, so I can have modifiers, or have repeats on axis nudging for example (ie keep moving the axis until keyup).

These keyboards are very nice, so if this works well I'll be lining up to get a few more

What about a custom Hal comp that presents each key or modifier and key as a Hal pin ?

Python should be able to handle that.

bymccoy wrote:

BeagleBrainz wrote: Can out get physical access to the row\col of the keyboard matrix ? if so a 7i73 could be the answer if you are going the MESA route of a custom USB solution, Arduino ProMicro or another mcu that has native USB.
Or as per your solution an MCU reading the serial and connecting via USB.

Any pics of the guts of the device ?

I do have pics, but it's basically a PIC, a serial interface etc. The keyboard is of course a row/col matrix, but the hardware is doing just fine. The serial interface works perfectly - the cable etc is a regular one, and I've got a couple of serial interfaces on the industrial PC's that I use.

The only real question is how I can get the ASCII from the serial interface and into LinuxCNC.

I think to do what you want to do it will be a user space (non-real time) compnent written in Python. There are a number of examples of talking to a serial device eg:
github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master..._comps/mitsub_vfd.py

but I don't know about a keyboard.

The 7i73 route will be real time and include the ability to manage MPG's and LCD's etc.

If you can get scan-codes in to LinuxCNC HAL then the matrix_kb component can make them in to HAL pin state changes.

I've got one of these denford desktop / desk-top tutor keyboards too.

robertspark wrote: I've got one of these denford desktop / desk-top tutor keyboards too.

14 x 8 matrix, so I guess that it might be straight-wired to the 25-pin D-sub.

But if it is, it can't be a parport pinout.

I would think that burying a 7i73 inside would be one answer, but an arduino or similar would be cheaper.

8 x 14 matrix (112 buttons available)

as can be seen there is a 22 pin I/O interface (8x14 matrix??) from the keyboard to the microcontroller.

I will see if I can get the ASCII codes for each of the buttons in the matrix.

I have thought about an arduino micro ATmega32u4 as it has a built in keyboard emulator capability..... but that may interfear with keyboard shortcuts?? in LinuxCNC

Pokeys 57U and Teensy are also similar keyboard emulator options.

I'll see if I can get the ASCII codes as I'd like to have a neat solution available as a cnc keyboard for shortcut buttons.

{early days for me + linuccnc, still learning about hal at the moment}

robertspark wrote: I have thought about an arduino micro ATmega32u4 as it has a built in keyboard emulator capability..... but that may interfear with keyboard shortcuts?? in LinuxCNC

One reason to like the 7i73 in this application is that the button presses stay in the realtime layer until you deliberately link them to user-space.

There are ways to achieve the same thing with a uC but I think that you would lose that with keyboard emulation..