Alps AKB-3420 vintage keyboard

[snuci]

Awesome find. Welcome to the "club". My keyboard, as shown above, didn't come with a cable at all so I would guess that these came without a cable. I don't see a cable in inyourgroove's keyboard either. However, that said, the ribbon cable you have on yours would be appropriate for the time. Very nice.

[seebart]

That's a small club snuci. We could start a Beamspring club instead.

[emdude]

I can get behind that.

[alh84001]

Well, it took a bit more than I expected, but here they are. Prepare to be potatoed.

Spoiler:

Keycaps are a tiny bit yellowed, and could use just a bit of retr0bright




Those caps are might thick





I love the back of this board. Clean and blue.


All metal case means there are some tiny spots of rust on the inner side of top case




Oldschool PCB, but it looks like someone already did some custom wiring. And it doesn't make too much sense to me.


And some other parts of the PCB




Well, hopefully, when I catch some time, I'll be able to get it to work, one way or another. It would be pretty cool to bring this piece of metal to work

[dorkvader]

having a 1 layer PCB and numbered switches really helps wiring it up.
Basically you want to figure out the matrix of rows and columns that make up the keyboard. So find out what switches are on the same row electrically, and the ones on the same column electrically. For example in your case, switches 47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55 and ? (can't read) are all on the same row. This means they all have to be on different columns. keeping this in mind will help.

also if you look switches 33-40 are on the same row, but you can see a jumper to the far left. following it around, we see switch 65 (lower pin) on the same row also. It can get a little convoluted though, since they are using upper pin as row for switch 33-40 but then lower pin for row elsewhere. Usually a bunch of switches on he bottom row will be at odd matrix positions, so you'll have to watch out for that.

I recommend looking at the controller chips and defining arbitrary row column numbers, then making a spreadsheet with the switch number

[lot_lizard]

I'm officially brainwashed at this point... this is sad. Every time I see the proper legacy "Alps" logo, I now think "Seebart". Your avatar waterboarding has paid off

[alh84001]

@dorkvader thanks for the help. I'm short on time to tackle it now, but it will come in handy when it comes to my work desk again.

Edit: adding soarer's config file