Anyone have a MacCharlie keyboard unit?

Tashtari said:

I find myself curious about the keyboard unit that came with them. If it plugged into the Mac's keyboard port (the one with the 4P4C phone handset-type jack), it's one of a very small number of devices that did, and maybe the only third-party one?

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Not the only one, but could be one of only two? I've got both the platinum ADB and beigy phone plug versions of the datadesk MAC-101.


Really curious to see an in depth look at the MacCharlie board. It was a surround for Apple's KBD.




Steve Jobs' accursed mouse use enforcement KBD abomination . . . no cursor keys! At least the MacCharlie provided NumLocked PageNav capability.

Way more function than the Apple Keypad I think.

Phil Beasley's pic on the linked website above shows the connection from Apple KBD to MacCharlie surround.

Is the "rewired phone cord" Mac KBD a serial ASCII interface. That would explain the additional functionality?

I recently acquired a MacCharlie with the keyboard extension, and I've been talking to @Tashtari about figuring out how it works. However, I've identified TEN bad key switches on it (no continuity across the pins when pressing the key). I know I can just manually short a key when eventually analyzing the protocol, but I'd really like to get this fully working. The keyboard extension appears to use the same long-stem ALPS switches as the M0110 and M0110A keyboards:



Realistically, I probably need 11 or 12 of these switches in case any others decide to go. Unfortunately, they're currently going for around $20 EACH on ebay. That means it would be cheaper for me to just buy and gut an entire M0110 keyboard, but I don't want to destroy a keyboard if I can avoid it. I guess I'm wondering if anyone has some of these switches or a beater/keycap-missing M0110/M0110A laying around they'd sell me cheap A nice person on discord found me some sanely-priced key switches, so nevermind Also, I just powered on the MacCharlie itself for the first time connected to my 128K, and it POSTed fine and tried to hit the floppy drive, so now I just need to make a DOS boot disk for it and see if the drives are functional...

Congrats and good luck. If you need an image of the MS-DOS disk that came with the MacCharlie, let me know.

EDIT: I posted archives of the diskettes I have here: https://vintagecomputer.ca/files/Apple/Macintosh/Dayna_MacCharlie/

snuci said:

Congrats and good luck. If you need an image of the MS-DOS disk that came with the MacCharlie, let me know.

EDIT: I posted archives of the diskettes I have here: https://vintagecomputer.ca/files/Apple/Macintosh/Dayna_MacCharlie/

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Thanks! I'd already found the software here and got it booting into DOS 3.10, but it looks like you have a couple things that site doesn't have



I've been working on replacing the bad key switches in the keyboard extension, and the TLDR is that I was eventually successful. The PCB is extremely cheap and the pads/traces lift if you breath on them. I did lift a few removing the bad switches (something I almost never do) and had to bodge around them. Then it would work very intermittently, which ultimately turned out to be because of a combination of problems. First, the cord from the extension to the M0110 connects to the PCB with a removable connector that I never could get to reliably make good contact on all 4 pins. So, I just soldered the 4 wires directly to the PCB. It was still working seemingly randomly after that, and I finally noticed that the P8748H microcontroller in the keyboard extension was only getting ~4.2v when the datasheet says it needs at least 4.5v.



The microcontroller running on fumes would explain it working intermittently. I checked the 5v at the Mac's floppy port and was only getting 4.76v with no peripherals connected. I tweaked the pot on the analog board up to 5.1v, and now the extension and attached keyboard seem to work reliably. So, if anyone else has the keyboard extension and it isn't working (but a standalone M0110 or M0110A works), check your 5v first! Now to reassemble the extension and put this whole thing together

Here's the whole enchilada running Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from the B drive:



Also, I love this cheeky error message:

Very nice to see another one running. Do you have the bottom tray that the MacCharlie and Mac sit on? Looks a little low or the keyboard is propped up.

Congrats!

snuci said:

Very nice to see another one running. Do you have the bottom tray that the MacCharlie and Mac sit on? Looks a little low or the keyboard is propped up.

Congrats!

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I don't have the bottom tray, but I 3D printed some risers for under the Mac's feet to raise it to the same height it would be at if sitting on the tray. That's why the Mac and MacCharlie line up vertically in my picture. When you have the tray, I believe the MacCharlie unit itself is still sitting directly on the desk on its rubber feet. At least that's the impression I got from this video. I did leave my contact info with the seller in case they come across the tray at some point, but I'm not optimistic.

You're right. The "teeth" on the right of the tray fit tightly into the bottom of the MacCharlie so it almost becomes one piece. The Mac then sits on top of it. If you want dimensions, I could measure it. I also have a second MacCharlie that is missing the tray but it also is not working. Tried a couple of times to fix it. It's very difficult when you essentially need a Macintosh to act as a terminal to talk to it. If the MacCharlie doesn't talk, it's hard to see where the issue is. BTW, that's my video. It's far too long but I tried to be thorough so I could remember some of this stuff .

snuci said:

You're right. The "teeth" on the right of the tray fit tightly into the bottom of the MacCharlie so it almost becomes one piece. The Mac then sits on top of it. If you want dimensions, I could measure it. I also have a second MacCharlie that is missing the tray but it also is not working. Tried a couple of times to fix it. It's very difficult when you essentially need a Macintosh to act as a terminal to talk to it. If the MacCharlie doesn't talk, it's hard to see where the issue is. BTW, that's my video. It's far too long but I tried to be thorough so I could remember some of this stuff .

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Thank you! That video was very helpful! I just wanted the Mac and MacCharlie to line up properly, and I think I worked out that the Mac needed to be raised 16mm to make that happen. So, I just printed four quick-and-dirty risers for the Mac's feet to sit on:



My printer isn't big enough to print an entire tray, but if you're able to create a reproduction STL of the actual tray, that would be awesome! I doubt the "teeth" would be strong enough to allow picking up both systems together, but an accurate model of the tray would still be cool to have

To "un-hijack" this thread, I've been talking to @Tashtari, and they're going to send me some equipment to help reverse-engineer the keyboard extension protocol.

If I can help, let me know. I did have one of the keyboard extensions open but unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. If there was firmware in it, I didn't save it either. I do have the other ROMs inside the MacCharlie but not the keyboard firmware, if there was a ROM in it.

snuci said:

If I can help, let me know. I did have one of the keyboard extensions open but unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. If there was firmware in it, I didn't save it either. I do have the other ROMs inside the MacCharlie but not the keyboard firmware, if there was a ROM in it.

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The keyboard extension doesn't have a ROM in it, but it does have a P8748H microcontroller in it as pictured in this post above. I don't know if there's a way to dump the microcontroller's programming:



Here's a picture of my MacCharlie's mainboard. As you can see, I have V3 of the Charlie ROM and V2 of the Emily ROM:



The Emily ROM seems older than the V4 dump you have on your site.

I have not tried to mess with 8748s but it does have 1K of programable ROM and I do have a programmer that will do 8748s. I could see if I have another 8748 for testing and see how/if it works. I'd hate to try it on a MacCharlie 8748 without testing it first.

snuci said:

I have not tried to mess with 8748s but it does have 1K of programable ROM and I do have a programmer that will do 8748s. I could see if I have another 8748 for testing and see how/if it works. I'd hate to try it on a MacCharlie 8748 without testing it first.

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Ya, I'm not going to let this one be the guinea pig Do you remember the part #'s of the ROMs on the mainboard?

Charlie V3.0 U51 = 27128
Emily V4 U93 = 2764