frechett@spot.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) (03/12/91)
And now for something completely different. A friend of mine recently proposed and idea that I would like to give some serious consideration. Here is the rough draft. He would like to find a small keyboard and rig it up so that it ouputs serial data. It would have it's own internal power source, but other than that, would be only a keyboard and a wire attached to it. He then hooks this up the the serial port of the hp48, and with the aid of a basic wordprocessing program could take notes for non-tech classes on his hp48sx. The only thing that was was initially desired for the word proccessing program would be that it at least wraps at 80 columns so that you don't end up with long lines.. This idea would mean very fast data entry to the calc, which could then be downloaded to a PC and printed out, or of course just dumped to a serial printer directly. With the aid of a 128K RAM card, you can have some fairly serious space to play with. I would like to know if anyone out there has any knowledge of keyboards and their output signals and what it might take to devise a serial ouput for a given keyboard. I feel that this venture is feasible but don't want to go charging into it if the obsticles are too big. On initial examination of my vt100 keyboard I would be led to believe that it could possibly output serially but I don't have the equipment to test it correctly at this point. I would like to hear anyone elses thoughts on this subject. ian -=Runaway Daemon=-