Posted by Matthew C. Waterman on 16, 2001 at 10:28 PM:
In Reply to: Re: That's a chip posted by Matthew C. Waterman on 16, 2001 at 7:44 PM:
There is a chip on the board under the lump. Right at the point where the flimsy plastic connects to the pcb, there is probably something that resembles a card-edge connector, or a row of straight copper lines, and the traces from each of those should lead back to the processor. Sometimes they coat the copper connections with a black material, if you just use a small xacto or a razorblade you can scrape that off, and then solder wires to the exposed copper. I think that was a better explanation. Any other ??s just ask. There are about 1 million people here who've done keyboard hacks like this.
: Your microchip is under that black lump. What about at the place where the flimsy touches electronics. Are there copper connections there? If so you can scrape off the black stuff and solder onto that.
: : I am a complete electronics newbie, so please excuse any mixup of terminology and the like. I am attempting to build a few hand buzzers for "You Don't Know Jack" per the instructions at http://wrongcrowd.com/~arcade/ydkjp2.shtml. Unfortunately, the keyboard I'm using does not use any sort of microchip on the PCB, and thus there are no solder joints to connec to. What I see is a circular black lump on the board that a number of "tracks" (the etchings in the PCB that I guess are analogous to wires) are connected to. Is anyone familiar with the type of keyboard I'm describing? Is this keyboard hopeless?
: : Thanks in advance for your help.