I saw this post, How to convert the Input Cover Kit to a secondary and external keyboard?, and was wondering if anyone could point me to helpful information for making this module into an external usb keyboard? It sounds like a really fun project, especially because there’s probably a good amount of people with spare 1st gen keyboard modules and 1st gen input cover kits since 2nd gen has released.
I was hoping somebody could point me towards information regarding:
Getting the input cover kit to output to a usb-c port? I think it would mainly require connecting this module to usb-c, since I don’t plan on adding a battery or bluetooth.
Getting the keyboard module itself output to a usb-c port?
If you’re still interested I’d be happy to suggest some things.
The keyboard, whether you connect directly to the keyboard cable or connect to the cable that comes out of the input cover, which comes from the touchpad pcb, you’re dealing with the same signals. The touchpad PCB doesn’t actually do anything except pass though the keyboard lines unchanged. It just serves to merge a few different cables into one, so that users can remove the input cover by only disconnecting one cable instead of several.
It’s the raw keyboard matrix lines. So you’d need to attach it to a MCU that can serve as a keyboard controller. The raspberry pi Pico can do this. And the FWL16 actually uses the very same chip, the rp2040. Just without the raspberry pi Pico PCB board. Others have guides on how to make keyboards using the rp2040, like adafruit. You can use some existing open source keyboard controller firmware. For USB keyboards, the one people use is qmk. For bluetooth or other wireless keyboards zmk is the most mature & popular, though there are a couple others. For wireless you’d want a different chip tho. A lot things you can just copy from other keyboards that use the same chip. The biggest change is that you need to enter the FW13’s specific keyboard matrix into qmk’s config files. It can be found here, Reusing Keyboard after Replacement - #11 by nrp Adafruit or maybe sparkfun might have a guide on keyboard matrices. Oh, and the cable pinouts are on FW’s github, github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Touchpad#pinout.
Hi !
To let you known, I’ve paid a mission to @Arya ( the person behind FairywrenTech in your link ) may be 2 or 3 years ago, the external keyboard was working but not the touchpad / fingerprint, so I’ve finally never uses it.
On the github FW link for touchpad, this document have been updated 6 months ago, so may be now there is more documentation to help to support the touchapd / fingerprint.
If you find a way to do it, I’ll be really happy to known it please.