Hooray! Despite making me jump through a few hoops to verify my identity, Dabs came through and delivered my Eee 900 today. I'm posting from it right now - the keyboard will take a bit of getting used to but it's a lot easier to type on than my previous UMPC. It'd be hard to give a negative review to something I've just spent 330 quid on but it is very good so far. It's a lot better built than I'd been expecting - it may look like a toy but it's very solid. Next step - apt-get emacs and pygame.
2 comments:
Hi, I loved the ZX Spectrum laptop - I'm currently starting an Eee/ZX project and found your page while looking for help in connecting the standard Spectrum keyboard to control the Eee.
Any ideas?
Hi Gareth, thanks for the comments.
I think an Eee with a Spectrum keyboard would be a great project. I've no idea how the Eee keyboard is wired up, but you have a lot more options to connect to the Eee than I did with the Libretto. If it were me, I'd attach a PIC, ATR or other microcontroller to the Spectrum keyboard and connect it to a USB port on the Eee. I believe you should be able to program a microcontroller to act as a USB keyboard, but I've not tried that myself yet.
The Spectrum keyboard is logically just an 8x5 grid of switches so you should be able to just connect those straight to pins on a microcontroller and have it scan each line in turn. The easiest way to connect to the Spectrum keyboard would be to use an edge connector like that in the Spectrum (you could just take the board connector off the Spectrum if you don't mind damaging it). I think the most difficult bit will be figuring out how to access all the keys on a normal PC keyboard with just the 40 keys on the Spectrum. You might need quite a lot of shift/alt/ctrl combinations. I haven't figured that out for my ZX Laptop yet - you can type all the normal letters but you can't get to the F-keys or numeric keypad for example.
The only other bit of advice I could offer would be not to overlook the physical construction of the keyboard. It needs quite good support from underneath because pressing the rubber keys needs more effort than a normal keyboard.
Good luck with it. Let me know how you get on.
Jim
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