Hello - just joined this group. I picked up a DN3010 and of course it is missing the keyboard/mouse. There is an old post from 1996 with pinouts and reference to some documentation (excerpt):
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The Apollo keyboard uses a 1200 Baud 8-e-1 TTL level serial data communications format. (Back in the days of SR-9.* you could even examine the keyboard SIO port parameters using "-line 0" with tea-kettle. ;)
There are 5 signals: (DIN-8 connector)
pin# Signal
1 V++ Power (+8.5V)
3,7 GND Ground
2 KBD_RESET Reset (active low)
4 KBD_RXD Receive data (to keyboard)
5 KBD_TXD Transmit data (from keyboard)
(Yes it's a full duplex device, you can send it commands as well as receive data from it). The numbering scheme on that DIN-8 connecter is weird, it's not consecutive but hops back and forth in a strange star patter.
The manual:
Series 10000 Technical Reference Library, 011724-A00
Volume 5 -Hardware Specifications
chapter 16 describes the keyboard hardware interface.
The manual:
Series 10000 Technical Reference Library, 011721-A00
Volume 2 -I/0 Devices
Chapter 8 gives a detailed explanation of the data formats, keyboard codes, keyboard control commands, pointer device data codes, and keyboard programmable features. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It seems that the documents are not available anywhere on line. They would be a first step to recreating the keyboard or making a converter.
There seems to be minimal interest in Apollo these days. Contrast that to the AT&T 3B2 series computers. A friend at the recent VCFMW is reverse engineering some of the rare AT&T boards. This involve stripping components and delaminating the 6-layer
boards to obtain the schematics. He has already done one of the mainboards, and is working on the NI (Ethernet) board. I mention this because it is a much greater effort than would be required for the Domain keyboard.
Sorry for long post but if anyone has a Keyboard 7121 and Mouse 7550 for DN3000 series, I would be interested, either for myself or as a donor for reverse engineering. That process may be destructive depending on the construction.
If someone has these or other technical documents not currently on line , I can have them posted on Bitsavers.
Series 10000 Technical Reference Library 011721-A00... etc Vols 1-5 (not sure if Series 10000 Keyboard is the same)
- John
On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 8:43:06 PM UTC-5,
tos...@gmail.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 7, 2022 at 2:30:23 PM UTC-7, Jim Rees wrote:
It's rs232 at 1200 bps. There is a keyboard connector pinout in the Apollo FAQ at http://web.mit.edu/kolya/www/csa-faq.html . I don't remember if this applies to the dn300.
hm, yeah dunno - the FAQ mentions pinout for the for the [345]xxx, but I'll at least check if the db9 pinout matches the rj45.
also going to just try running against sio1 :)
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