Coming in at the end of the month of SepTandy, there’s a new guide adapting the Tandy 1000 keyboard to work with a modern computer. Even if you don’t have a Tandy 1000 keyboard, you might still enjoy the guide’s gallery page—this keyboard has wild keyswitches!
In this guide, you’ll see how to adapt a Tandy 1000 keyboard for use on modern computers using CircuitPython and an Adafruit QT Py RP2040 microcontroller board.
The techniques in this guide may also be helpful in converting other classic keyboards that use a clocked serial protocol. The RP2040’s “pio” peripheral is perfect for this kind of low level I/O task, and even provides a buffer for up to 8 key events so no keypresses get lost.
Check out Jeff’s new guide today!