Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered

Who knows what you’ll find in a second-hand shop? [Zeal] found some old keyboards made to fit early Alcatel phones from the year 2000 or so. They looked good but, of course, had no documentation. He’s made two videos about his adventure, and you can see them below.

The connector was a cellphone-style phone jack that must carry power and some sort of serial data. Inside, there wasn’t much other than a major chip and a membrane keyboard. There were a few small support chips and components, too.

This is a natural job for a logic analyzer. Sure enough, pressing a key showed some output on the logic analyzer. The device only outputs data, and so, in part 2, [Zeal] adds it to his single-board Z-80 computer.

It makes a cute package, but it did take some level shifting to get the 5V logic to play nice with the lower-voltage keyboard. He used a processor to provide protocol translation, although it looks like you could have easily handled the whole thing in the host computer software if you had wanted to do so.

Truthfully, there isn’t much chance you are going to find this exact keyboard. However, the process of opening a strange device and reverse engineering what it is all about is classic.

Don’t have a logic analyzer? A scope might have been usable for this, but you can also build one for very little these days. Using a PS/2 keyboard isn’t really easier, by the way, it is just well-documented.

3 thoughts on “Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered

  1. A shame to throw out perfectly good and working obsolete tech. Add a BT chip and you have a keyboard that can pair with many things. Good work figuring it out.

    I have lots of brand new Ericsson mobile phone handsets (Type 2121)…these are 600 baud terminals with a speaker, microphone, numeric keypad and and alphanumeric display. This handset would have been mounted in a car and hooked up using an 8 wire coily cord to the 3W AMPS cell phone under the seat. Reverse engineered it, figured out the hex codes and how to write to the LCD. Then I tracked down the manual too. But other than movies that required a 1990’s era prop, no one cares. Tried e-bay… handful of views.

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