Hi Bunsen!
I may end up gettting another dead 100 series Book of from Ebay soon so I can rip the keyboard open, and in that case I could cut a strip of matching grey plastic to help fill that in, but I'm not sure about how the seems at the edges would end up looking. At anyrate it will be another bridge to cross when the time comes :beige:
The USB conversion: Maybe. I thought about gutting a mouse a USB mouse and doing something similer, but it looked like a lot of work. With the imate adapter it will just plug in and work like a USB mouse. One issue though that may change this though is the fact that the motherboard needs to be able to squeeze under a part of the track ball. Its going to be a very tight fit and it looks like it may have to play with my dremel a bit for everything to fit. But if that fails then it will be back to the USB mouse/trackball conversion.
My plan from the start was to just wire it straight into a PS/2 keyboard controller and then worry about remapping everything on the Os side. Which kind of works, but since the actual keyboard matrices are so diffrent, it left large dead spots on the powerbook keyboard. It may be possible to get around this once I have another Powerbook keyboard too look at, but at the moment its not looking to good. So I'm playing around with getting and Arduino to play as an HID USB device, then load a keyboard matrix library in it and have it prettend to be the controller. But then Arduinos are chunky things, and that might mean lossing the harddrive in order to gain more room, and replacing it with a large USB drive or SD card.
Long ways to go, but I'm learning a bunch which is fun. Just going to keep pushing on and hope for the best
.
I may end up gettting another dead 100 series Book of from Ebay soon so I can rip the keyboard open, and in that case I could cut a strip of matching grey plastic to help fill that in, but I'm not sure about how the seems at the edges would end up looking. At anyrate it will be another bridge to cross when the time comes :beige:
The USB conversion: Maybe. I thought about gutting a mouse a USB mouse and doing something similer, but it looked like a lot of work. With the imate adapter it will just plug in and work like a USB mouse. One issue though that may change this though is the fact that the motherboard needs to be able to squeeze under a part of the track ball. Its going to be a very tight fit and it looks like it may have to play with my dremel a bit for everything to fit. But if that fails then it will be back to the USB mouse/trackball conversion.
My plan from the start was to just wire it straight into a PS/2 keyboard controller and then worry about remapping everything on the Os side. Which kind of works, but since the actual keyboard matrices are so diffrent, it left large dead spots on the powerbook keyboard. It may be possible to get around this once I have another Powerbook keyboard too look at, but at the moment its not looking to good. So I'm playing around with getting and Arduino to play as an HID USB device, then load a keyboard matrix library in it and have it prettend to be the controller. But then Arduinos are chunky things, and that might mean lossing the harddrive in order to gain more room, and replacing it with a large USB drive or SD card.
Long ways to go, but I'm learning a bunch which is fun. Just going to keep pushing on and hope for the best
.