Czech Discovery Ressurects PS/2 Keyboard

Like us, you probably have piles of old PS/2 keyboards occupying strategic positions in your house and causing all sorts of trouble with the neighbours. As luck would have it, there is a way to put those lazy peripherals to work!

Our friends in the Czech Republic have successfully interfaced a PS/2 keyboard to an STM32 Discovery board (translated), and not a moment too soon—just in time for you to integrate their work into your entries for those juicy contests we told you about (the European one and the North American one).

The project page contains an in-depth walkthrough of how the PS/2 connection talks to the keyboard hardware along with source code and links, more than enough information to get started with a PS/2 keyboard hack on your Discovery application. And why stop at keyboards? Give your old PS/2 mouse a new lease on life, or even hook up your custom game controller to spice up the experience.

17 thoughts on “Czech Discovery Ressurects PS/2 Keyboard

  1. What do you mean, resurrect? I’m still adamant on getting PS/2 keyboards and mouses. Plugging them into usb ports is a waste of ports, since most motherboards still have 2 connectors dedicated to mouse and keyboard.

  2. I thought PS/2 and USB keyboards had identical outputs…which is why you can get a cheap adapter to change one to the other – all you have to do is change where the pins go, you don’t have to have a chip to translate it or anything. So wouldn’t this work just as well with a USB keyboard?

  3. My primary keyboard is a 1987 generic buckling spring behemoth with an old school DIN-5 connector. I connect it to USB with a chain of adapters. It has a macro key in place of the windows key, and an extra home key in the middle of the arrows.

  4. find a use for those old AT keyboards. anything they can natively interface with is a piece of shit. PS/2 keyboards, on the other hand, come in very handy when you burn out your onboard usb ports and are not a fucking genius that can inspect and repair microcircuits. you can’t get into the BIOS with a usb expansioncard. actually, i faintly remember there being a program that allowed me to do just that, by loading the drivers before windows, back in the days of FAIL that was windows millenium, and would not be repeated until the introduction of vista. except for that pre-SP1 security hole that XP came with.

  5. I’m in the boat with the USB/ps2 converter dongle thingy crowd. Never had a problem. Most of my machines are still old enough that they still have ps2 ports on them. Sad, but I don’t edit video so I don’t need super horsepower lol.

  6. Screw ps/2, I’m fine with DIN. My last primary desktop used din, now my new pc only has one PS/2 port which is unutilized. I have a sidewinder x6 keyboard and a sidewinder X8 mouse hooked to my main, I did recently find a junky PIII dell in a dumpster that I physically restored and uped the dimms to a max of 512mbs. I’m giving it my ps/2 keyboard and am installing freedos on it. I also brightened it. I might use alittle retro-brite on the keyboard and computer components and add some led fans and such, it’d probbably sell for less than sixty bucks. Damn pc had the monitor, too.

  7. oh and btw; that whole “screw ps2 remark was a joke” although I don’t ever find myself using a ps/2 mouse soon. When I use a mouse with any interface older than usb, it’s usually my logitech serial mouse that I put a sticker of tux on. I’m putting that on my new junkbox too. Lol, I polished the metal and completely toredown that dell and gave it a thourough cleaning, I also worked mcquires high gloss protectant into all the plastic components. (even within the psu)

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