Help! I need some keyboard troubleshooting.

[Joe]

I have pretty much this problem with my newly built replica. I've just scribbled down all of the suggestions in this thread which I will go and try in a second however. I suspect that the issue may be the keyboard - it is one of the silly ones with multimedia keys (it's hard to get a vanilla ps/2 keyboard these days it'd seem).

When I power on and reset I see this

\
@

which I gather is correct.

Also the power switch doesn't really seem to do anything. I'm using USB power and as soon as I plug in the cable the board powers on regardless of the position of the switch. I've checked the switch for solder bridges etc and it all seems fine; I guess it doesn't really matter but it does seem somewhat bizarre.

Another thing I ought to mention (more regarding the keyboard) is that I had a slightly faulty iron which I didn't notice until it had managed to burn the board slightly in one place. I checked the track which is nearby to make sure it is still in tact and it seems to be (I only have a multimeter however) and then the iron I bought to replace that was the single most worthless bit of kit I've ever used (the tip melted and a tiny bit dripped onto the PCB amazingly) and didn't notice that until it also had burnt the board very slightly, although it is on the bottom in an area with no tracks so I'm not worried about it. I thought this would be worht mentioning in case it could be an issue, but as I said I checked everything over when I realised what happened and it all seems ok to me. That'll teach me to buy Draper products; I should have known better.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any help,
Joe

[daustin777]

I went through 3 or 4 keyboards until I found one that worked. It was one that came with a Windows machine I had- plain, no multimedia keys.

Also the power switch doesn't really seem to do anything. I'm using USB power

I fairly sure that the power-switch only controls the 6v input.

\
@

correct

[Joe]

I managed to get my hands on a 10 year old Dell keyboard last night and tried that. It was an improvement over the last one in that it did input characters, however they were not mapping correctly as mentioned in another thread here. I'm guessing this can be solved by trying more keyboards until one works. Also however sometimes the keyboard doesn't work at all for reasons that I can't decipher. Sometimes the Replica powers on and the keyboard works, sometimes it doesn't.

I can input from my laptop's keyboard fine via HyperTerminal (note that this is not included with Vista and you have to download it separately) however it doesn't seem to recognise the 'return' key which slows things down a bit.

I guess it's just a matter of trying more ps/2 keyboards until one works fully.

[vbriel]

Just curious, but what are you using for power supply? ATX or wall wart? If wall wart, what is the voltage and current specs? This could be an issue since the keyboard is powered from the replica power supply. If your replica 1 is a kit, I know I say this a 1000 times but check all of your solder connections.

The area of concern would be the ATMEGA8 that controls the ps/2 keyboard and the ps/2 connector. Since the serial portion works just fine, I would eliminate the ATMEGA8515 as a possible cause.

Vince

[Joe]

I've checked and double checked all of my soldering and I think it's ok, although I shall check it again. I'm using USB power at the moment as I don't have a wall wart or ATX power supply kicking about that I could use, although I am planning on getting one of the little power supply boards designed for ITX machines in the near future (they use ATX standard).

[mfortuna]

I had an interesting problem with my Replica 1. I have been using both USB and the serial port along with tera term. On a side note USB has proved to be very unreliable for software downloads. I'm using the serial port.

Anyway, last night I hooked up an Apple Monitor III and a PS3 keyboard to see if it worked. The screen worked fine but the keyboard was producing random characters. I finally put the ASCII jumper on thinking maybe the silkscreen was wrong. The keyboard didn't work at all. When I removed the jumper the keyboard worked fine!

I was going to look at the ATMEGA8 firmware to see what effect the jumper has, it almost seems to be a reset issue.

Mike

[vbriel]

Hey Mike,

Do you mean ps2 keyboard? Check solder connections on the ATMEGA8 keyboard controller and the ATMEGA8515 I/O controller. Try a different keyboard.

Vince

[Kallikak]

This sounds very like a problem I have sometimes. Occasionally after startup I need to "reset" the keyboard. For this reason I keep a pushbutton attached to the keyboard jumper so I just have to give it a click and everything works fine.

Ken

[Joe]

This sounds very like a problem I have sometimes. Occasionally after startup I need to "reset" the keyboard. For this reason I keep a pushbutton attached to the keyboard jumper so I just have to give it a click and everything works fine.

Ken

I just tried this and sadly it didn't work.

I have now tried upwards of 20 keyboards with no luck. I'm guessing either I have messed up somewhere or I have a dead IC. Sadly my logic probe isn't with me (I'm at uni at the moment, logic probe is at the other end of the country) and I'm no expert with it - more of the CSc side of things than the EE side.

I'm kind of lost for things to try now; the Replica has set on my shelf in a static bag for a couple of months with me trying not to look at it because it depresses me that I can't get something so simple to work

[vbriel]

I have fallen into this trap in the past with many project, thus they never get finished. I can fix your replica if you send it in to me for free.

It could be a bad keyboard chip or something, hard to tell. The major difference is, I have a stock of parts I can swap out with to check. So, if you would like me to look at it, email me and we will get it going. I want every replica 1 running

Vince