For those who’re into retro computer systems, you already know the headache of looking for and preserve peripherals that work along with your machine. Keyboards fail, mice fail, cables fail, and ultimately you’re pulling your hair out troubleshooting a singular keyboard decoder IC of which solely 10000 have been ever made and no person bothered to doc. Nicely, for the Solar aficionados on the market, the usb3sun involves the rescue!
Solar keyboards use a singular serial interface to speak with the system. The usb3sun converts USB occasions from keyboards/mice to this serial protocol. Not solely does it assist you to use trendy keyboards and mice with Solar SPARCstations, nevertheless it additionally helps emulating all of the distinctive keys the SPARCstation keyboards have, just like the smooth power-on, Cease, Line Feed and Compose keys, to call a couple of. The undertaking can be solely open supply. The firmware and PCB layouts are posted over on GitHub and the documentation is great.
Creator Humorous Pc Museum (aka Delan Azabani, hacker extraordinaire) has additionally added a couple of additional touches to match the unique, together with a piezo speaker to emulate the important thing click on noise that Solar keyboards make, in addition to an SSD1306 show to indicate the LED indicators for CapsLock, ScrollLock, and many others. Various keyboards and mice have been examined and verified to work, although it seems work continues to be ongoing on this space. For those who decide certainly one of these up and it really works out of the field, you should definitely report your keyboard/mouse make and mannequin to assist enhance the undertaking for everybody.
So should you’re a Solar SPARCstation nut in want of an easy-to-use trendy keyboard and mouse substitute, look no additional!
