Subject: RE: [E3-hacking] External keyboard (mailboard) support for 2.6

From: Cliff Lawson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 13:30:29 +0100

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Callow [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 04 April 2006 12:57
> To: Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer hardware/software
> Subject: [E3-hacking] External keyboard (mailboard) support for 2.6
> 
> I've been working on this for a while now, but I still cant get it to 
> work reliably.

It took us about a YEAR(!) to get the bloody keyboard working reliably so
you're on the early stage of your journey. In a future design I'm going to
stick in something like an 8 bit Atmel AVR to mop up IO and have the
dedicated task of talking to these bloody clock master PS/2 controllers to
save the aggro. (it is a shame that Linux makes you go through such hoops
for fast interrupt service though and is the reason why I never use the term
RTOS applied to Linux even if the kernel has "realtime" patches - I can't
help thinking this would have been easier in VxWorks!)

But anyway, after a couple of gentle nudges:

www.ourcottage.plus.com/ams_keyb_mod.c (from kernel/drivers/char)

I'm not sure what dependent .h you might need so holler when it won't build!

Cliff

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---

From: Matt Callow <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:07:13 +0100

Cliff Lawson wrote:
> you're on the early stage of your journey. 
Great! :-) 
It seems wise to follow the FIQ route then, since you've probably 
already explored all other options. I will try to get the FIQ handler 
working with the 2.6 kernel.
Hopefully having a working 2.4 version will hopefully bring the 
development time down to less that a year!
> I'm not sure what dependent .h you might need so holler when it won't build!
Thanks for that. Probably not going to try to compile it, as the matrix 
keyboard is already handled in the omap code, and I'm planing to write a 
driver that will fit in with the serio framework in the 2.6 kernel. But 
it's still useful to have. Whilst looking at the code, I noticed that 
the qwe interrupt handler writes to latch2 AMS_DELTA_HDW_OP_SCARD_2_MASK 
(I'm assuming AMS_DELTA_HDW_OP_SCARD_2_MASK is 0x400), setting it at the 
start and clearing it at the end. Is this for debug purposes only? I 
noticed a similar thing in the FIQ handler using GPIO6.

I also notice that the driver has some code for writing to the keyboard, 
but data never seems to be sent. Is my understanding correct? Does the 
keyboard accept data?

Matt