[PLUG] interesting (painful) mystery
Wil Cooley
wcooley at nakedape.cc
Wed Oct 24 18:42:39 UTC 2007
On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 17:24 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> Reality is not digital. A keyboard is accessed differently during
> some operating states than others, and a flaky keyboard (or hard
> drive, or power supply, or ...) may fail under some conditions and
> not others, because of voltage changes, timing changes, etc.
> Keyboards fail like analog devices, not digital ones, and it is
> inevitable that they fail first under a subset of all conditions.
Precisely. As an example, I have a neat PS/2 keyboard with a built-in
trackball that I got from the FreeGeek store. I use it with my MythTV
box. However, I could not get the trackball to work correctly, so I
connected it to a PS/2->USB adapter and it works just fine. Go figure!
> I have seen keyboards fail mechanically A LOT ( just a little corrosion
> can make a keyboard intermittent and timing dependent ) and I have seen
> a keyboard controller chip fail twice. I keep spare keyboards around
> for just that reason - they are the most likely component to fail.
I don't know that I have seen very many keyboards fail outright. Usually
they just get so boogered up that the keys become painful to use. Or
they have somehow gotten unplugged. I guess both of those count as
mechanical failures though.
Wil
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