Friday, November 10, 2017

Keyboard & ControlBlock update

Keyboard adapter: 


I added wires for 3 pins from the Atari keyboard:
  • 18 is common ground for the power LED and the 4 keys RESET, OPTION, SELECT, & START.
  • 23 is the RESET key.
  • 24 is the LED (+5V).

ControlBlock:

These will go to the ControlBlock (which arrived, BTW, some time ago!). They will provide a power switch and status indicator for the Raspberry Pi!  Pretty cool.  See the video.





The ControlBlock has its own power socket (mini-USB), so I had to make another hole.  I've 2 holes now I can patch.  The way it works, power is fed to the CB, which then routes it to the Pi.  I haven't checked the Pi 3 or later boards to see if they finally resolved the lack of a power switch.



As you can see from the labeling on the CB, it's arranged with 2 controllers in mind - and quite a few functions for each!  Each of these will run to the joystick ports, where there will be 15 pin connectors.  I'm debating redoing those connectors with pre-fab ribbon connectors or something that may hold up to wear better.  Now that I've seen that the epoxy does not hold very well, I can see them popping off.



1 comment:

  1. Could I ask where you got the ribbon connector? I'm going to do the same thing.

    ReplyDelete