Mac Air keyboard on my lappy?

Hey there.

I'm a proud owner of the awesome, if not slightly flawed Clevo W110ER.

Basically, I want to improve the laptop, starting with, a backlit keyboard.

Having looked around, there are almost no machines with a backlit keyboard at the 11 inch bracket. The M11x Keyboard is too big and that's the only one other than the Air that I could find. The Mac Air keyboard looks about the right size but I can't be sure.

The way I was thinking of going about it, was to map the wires/contacts on the Mac Air keyboard so they'd work with PS/2 on the Clevo. Power for the backlight might have to be drawn from another USB port or something.

I have 0 idea if this would ever work even if they keyboard fitted in the hole, what do you crazy notebook modders think? Are there any other keyboards that might fit the bill?

Thanks

 

Anybody have an opinion on this?

 

Yes. While a notebook keyboard is still presented to the operating system as a PS/2 device there are no realistic way to inject keyboard communication without reprogramming the keyboard controller. Replacing the touchpad would be easy in comparison as it still is a dedicated connector with standard PS/2 signals (in all computers I've opened up at least). Sadly while it would be possible to connect a keyboard on the mouse connector and get it to work electrically and protocol wise most operating systems doesn't check what kind of device is attached but assumes the keyboard connector have keyboard traffic and the mouse connector have mouse traffic...

However ignoring that Apple machines uses either the ADB protocol (old machines) or the USB protocol (most machines) for keyboard and touchpad so finding an internal USB connector to attach the transplant keyboard would be the easiest solution. Getting the backlight to work can be a bit trickier though, at least if you want it adjustable. Another problem is that special functions (fn+f1 etc.) will not work.

There are another alternative: one can remove the Apple controller board and build a circuit that scans the new keyboard and remaps it to the original keyboard matrix. This requires a lot of skills including microcontroller programming.

 

Thank you for a brilliant and useful response ^^

I was thinking very much the same thing in terms of using an internal USB header, but rather splitting a USB internally into two ports (Kinda like a USB hub really) instead of one to power the keyboard that way. I don't know there is going to be the much in the way of leadway in terms of places to connect USB devices a standard. The BIOS works with a USB keyboard, so I'm good from that point of view.

Backlight should be doable, if I'm using USB I should fairly easily be able to draw enough power directly from the USB. I don't care whatsoever about backlight adjustment if I'm honest, what would be ideal is literally an on and off.

So it looks like my main issue here is to do with function keys. I need a control for screen brightness and such. Since it's connecting by USB, am I going to have these problems you mention with them not working properly?

 

yes as a USB keyboard does not have specific key mapping for the Fn Key. if you could find a way to inject that key by reading it and remapping something I am not sure but have never heard of it done and most Fn Keys are tied right to the BOIS/EFI

 

Hmm okay, so this will be an issue.

Would I be able to create something software based in Windows that would be able to handle the jobs of the function keys? They are hardware based usually, and ideally, but I'm trying to think of workarounds for this. I am not going to be able to reprogram a microcontroller (For this purpose) to my knowledge.

 

I am afraid I cant help you there. Personally I would be lazy and just mount micro EL wire under the keys

 

Well there's the issue of the backlighting itself in terms of the keys not being see through and also the issue of the keyboard being fairly terrible as is. Keys are quite loose, move around a lot when you move them, they're not quite aligned properly in places etc.