04-24-2021, 07:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-24-2021, 02:24 PM by ab1jx.
Edit Reason: typo
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Well, I never had much to do with Apple so they made a good scapegoat. USB soundcards are another thing I've lately gotten into, including the $7 on Aliexpress variety.. And as a network interface it does reasonably well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
I still haven't opened my PBP in the past few months and looked, but that 8-write limit prevents development work. Could be OK if you just want to install a new version once a year or so. I'm not good at soldering and unsoldering that tiny stuff.
Disassemblers and assemblers become more like screwdrivers for taking things apart and putting back together with simpler code. It's fairly pointless to disassemble something that came out of a compiler. I've seen, I think, when they work well, that you can feed code from a disassembler back into an assembler. There are always spots where they can't tell code from data that you have to help them over. If nothing references an address as code they tend to think it's data. If they try to disassemble data you get nonsense.
If space weren't a problem you could just put another USB keyboard in there.
I just installed and tried mcu8051ide from Debian debs, Manjaro may have it too. It's an IDE for working with the 8051 and a dozen or more other chips (not the exact one in the PBP). Has a disassembler, assembler, simulator, not sure what else. Looks OK. Last time I did much with assembly it was with a PIC chip which I don't think this handles but does some Atmel. Atmel bought them anyway I thiink.
My biggest gripe with USB is that it isn't realtime. The common rebuttal to this is that you just need a faster computer with a dedicated USB port for each realtime device. But this doesn't actually solve the problem. Where this becomes very critical is MIDI. MIDI just doesn't belong on USB, but we're almost to the point where USB is replacing conventional MIDI altogether. Many new standalone hardware audio devices have a USB connector in stead of DIN or even 1/4" jacks for MIDI.
I've had my head into 65xx in recent years, but not so recent that I'd say I'm still proficient. I'm very happy to see that you are willing to delve into 8051 for this, because it is something that in the past I'd really enjoy doing, but just don't have the facilities to do these days.
(04-22-2021, 12:05 AM)KC9UDX Wrote: I know the chip isn't proprietary, but the software it runs, which makes the keyboard work, is. It's probably normal these days, just odd to me that a keyboard manufacturer would supply software for you to run outside of the product they deliver.
I agree, such an arrangement is rather weird. It would be interesting to see how the "normal" USB keyboards are implemented in "regular" x86 laptops.
(04-24-2021, 05:23 AM)KC9UDX Wrote: It is my opinion, right or wrong, that if we're going to have a fully functional keyboard and a touchpad without serious hysteresis, someone is going to have to write the firmware from scratch in 8051.
Having a replacement, open-source firmware for the keyboard and the touchpad would be really great, but...
(04-24-2021, 07:05 AM)ab1jx Wrote: I still haven't opened my PBP in the past few months and looked, but that 8-write limit prevents development work. Could be OK if you just want to install a new version once a year or so.
... the low write limit would make the development of the replacement firmware rather complicated.
I'm not saying I'm willing to delve into it, just that it's easy to get the IDE. I have 3 or 4 programming projects backed up now, it gets hard to remember what you were doing after a few weeks, what variable was what, etc. But I had this bright idea of superimposing an FFT on an audiogram so I'm trying to remember FFTW. I think before that I was writing something to make composite images of cover scans of old electronics magazines like Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics because I found PDFs online, 50 years of each. https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-El...-Guide.htm They have Byte back issues and several others too. And adding a pause and volume control to this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cgi-jukebox/ And before that there was something else.
As far as I know now I could only write my flash 8 times. There are a few different hex files which come with the updater, is one of those the original by any chance? There are ones labelled ansi and iso but there's also fw_tp_update.hex and tpfw.bin. I'd say whoever wrote the current update would be a better candidate. It's almost like they didn't check all the keys when they got done. Sounded like somebody on Redit had a fixed version
Realtime, there's a guy in the Debian ARM list down south somewhere with a big old lathe he's got connected to a computer and he keeps complaining about software being too slow and all this inertia if something goes wrong and parts get broken. Apparently there are realtime kernels, have you tried one? He has a couple Rock64s but I think he went back to using a Pi.
(04-25-2021, 12:55 PM)ab1jx Wrote: I think before that I was writing something to make composite images of cover scans of old electronics magazines like Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics because I found PDFs online, 50 years of each. https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-El...-Guide.htm They have Byte back issues and several others too.
Those are amazing archives! Now, if I only had a couple of extra lives to read everything that's freely available these days... 
(04-25-2021, 12:55 PM)ab1jx Wrote: There are ones labelled ansi and iso but there's also fw_tp_update.hex and tpfw.bin.
As far as I know, the former is the "helper" firmware that gets flashed to the keyboard in the first step, and the latter is the actual touchpad firmware that gets flashed in the second step. The touchpad is connected to the keyboard via I2C, so the keyboard "forwards" the firmware to the touchpad in the second step, using the "helper" firmware flashed to the keyboard in the first step.
Real-time kernels are, like a fast computer with a dedicated port, a good way to hide the USB packet latency problem, but not a way to fix it.
Running a lathe on USB? I sure hope not! Yikes!
04-25-2021, 04:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-25-2021, 04:44 PM by ab1jx.
Edit Reason: typo
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I started a post but lost it amongst a zillion open browser tabs. I put the disassembled code on Pastebin https://pastebin.com/M80Sgxxw It's over my head, 10,000 lines with no comments or real labels.
There is a Linux CNC bunch, he's in that. There are controllers I think, but if he's talking to one with a Rock64 or a Pi I think it's over USB because there isn't much else.
The magazines are all old so the electronics are obsolete, but I saw several articles mentioned about making PC boards, some antennas, other things that don't become obsolete. My idea was to get a year's worth of front covers into one big image so you had like a newsstand view. The major articles are listed on the fronts. I was using this and ImageMagick to grab front cover images:
Code: #!/bin/bash
# extract 1st pages of a batch of pdfs to jpegs as thumbnails
for f in *.pdf; do convert $f[0] $f.jpg; done
That works well enough, it's putting them together in memory under program control and writing them out that I got bogged down on. Then a couple other projects came along. But there are about 50 years each of those 2 magazines. They might be readable with a year's worth of covers in a 1920x1080 image. 4 columns and 3 rows gives about 2500x2500 pixels so they'd need to be scaled down, ImageMagick can handle that in batches too.
We've diverted quite far from the original keyboard issues.
There are parts of this thread that are relevant
https://old.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/...appointed/
I haven't looked elsewhere there. I do have a Reddit account but rarely use it. And there may be official communications on other channels like IRC that I haven't checked.
One option I guess is to buy a docking station and use an external mouse and keyboard. Or just plug a couple powered bubs into it. I've never seen all the fancy features work so I'm quite satisfied with it the way it is. I've got 6 days of uptime, been working on programs and downloading from torrents, it's very stable and 12 years more advanced than my previous laptop (which still runs). I would seriously consider buying one cheap with a dead keyboard and trackpad although I don't like the fixed pixel size of the display. It's probably about comparable to my Odroid N2 which I haven't powered up in a year or so. Most Malis seem disappointing because of the lack of X11 drivers, I haven't tried Vulkan on this. It has one of the Malis that's potentially easy to work with I think.
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