A lot of people can bake a cake. Sort of. Most of us can bake a cake if we have a cake mix. Making a cake from scratch is a different proposition. Sure, you know it is possible, but in real life, most of us just get a box of cake mix. The Raspberry Pi isn’t a cake (or even a pie), but you could make the same observation about it. You know the Raspberry Pi is just an ARM computer, you could program it without running an available operating system, but realistically you won’t. This is what makes it fun to watch those that are taking on this challenge.

[Deater] is writing his own Pi operating system and he faced a daunting problem: keyboard input. Usually, you plug a USB keyboard into the Pi (or a hub connected to the Pi). But this only works because of the Linux USB stack and drivers exist. That’s a lot of code to get working just to get simple keyboard input working for testing and debugging. That’s why [Deater] created a PS/2 keyboard interface for the Pi.

Even if you aren’t writing your own OS, you might find it useful to use a PS/2 keyboard to free up a USB port, or maybe you want to connect that beautiful Model-M keyboard without a USB adapter. The PS/2 keyboard uses a relatively simple clock and data protocol that is well-understood. The only real issue is converting the 5V PS/2 signals to 3.3V for the Pi (and vice versa, of course).

The code bit bangs the PS/2 clock and data, unlike some other projects that tie up the UART (disallowing use of the serial console for development). [Deater] says the code might work with a mouse with a little work. The challenge is handling the data rate in the face of unknown interrupt latencies. The USB port on [Deater’s] PCB, by the way, allows you to connect some USB keyboards that fall back to PS/2 mode with an adapter. You can’t just plug any USB keyboard into it.

We’ve covered PS/2 interfacing to different platforms before and even saw a keyboard converted to a drum machine. You can see a video about the construction of the Raspberry Pi interface below.