So this is part of a larger project to modernise a 1987 Toshiba T1000 laptop using the amazing and tiny LattePanda. For those of you that don't know, the LattePanda is a tiny x86 computer board that has a quad core Atom processor, 4Gb of Ram, and 64Gb of flash storage and also contains an Arduino. And when I say it's tiny, I mean palm of your hand sized! The Laptop project will be a whole other Instructable when it's done. For now this guide will show you how to make your old non standard keyboard work with USB. That means this same process can be applied to a Commodore 64 keyboard or whatever you like!

The largest obstacle in this project for me was interfacing the old original keyboard with the modern system via USB, and having Windows think it's a regular keyboard. I first thought I could buy a USB keyboard, rip out it's controller and somehow tie it into the old keyboard. I spent quite a bit of time on this, and to some extent it it did work. But I could never get all the keys to work. I thought it best to use and Arduino then, and modify a couple sketches to get it working. Although the LattePanda has an Arduino built right in, it is limited to 20 input pins and cannot be programmed to be seen as a keyboard by windows as much as I could tell. But then I got wise to the existence of the Teensy LC micorcontroller, and this changed everything. The Teensy is as the name suggests is tiny, and has more than enough I/O pins. It's also very cheap and light on power.

Materials:

-A keyboard of your choice disassembled

-Teensy LC or other Teensy

-Ribbon cable with solderable pins on the end (optional)