Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected – all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of fun.
The things people do for the perfect keyboard.
It’s a fun little read. Oscilloscopes are a must for doing this sort of thing. The cheap USB ones that work with sigrok make great sophisticated software signal analyzers that can decode many signals in real time.
https://sigrok.org/blog/
Just be aware that ordinary oscilloscopes require a common ground rather than a differential signal (this is a bad design IMHO, but this is how it’s always been done). So be aware it can easily cause shorts and may even damage your USB controller. I’d recommend getting a USB voltage isolator in addition to the USB oscilloscope. They’re both cheap from ebay.
I just use GNU Screen’s built-in support when I need a serial terminal. It’s simpler.
Just
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 19200 8N1in the case of the Soekris net5501 I used to have.Pro tip of the day! Thank you.
True, however you’d be surprised how many people, even those who use screen regularly, don’t know it has this function unless they work with terminals on a regular basis. On the other hand, Minicom never gave me trouble either but that’s likely because I was use to Telix back in the DOS days which is where Minicom took a lot of its early inspiration. I’m with you though, as soon as I found out that screen had that function, I switched to using it under *NIX and MacOS. I still use PuTTY if I have to do a terminal on Windows though.
darknexus,
I use microcom and picocom. I didn’t even realize there was a minicom, haha. I think they all work similarly but it’s easy to get tripped up by different escape keys and command line switches.
While it often is recognized only as a Windows-based tool, PuTTY and it’s associated terminal-based counterpart plink are available on Linux also. It’s arguably a more approachable tool for this kind of work. I also like it’s default monospaced, bitmap font 🙂