The best thing to start searching for a breakout board might be to look for ones for breaking out laptop LCDs for connecting to FPGAs (its a weirdly common thing). You can use a Ribbon Cable Breakout Board that requires soldering the ribbon cable on. This is an old question, but one that I've heard many times over the years and until recently never had a good answer for, but now I do so I'll share: I've used one of these before and liked it very much. You can probably find it from other retailers as well if you want. Newegg also sells a similar design from Rosewell which looks even more appealing to me:Īnd Microsoft makes a very nice, spill-resistant, laptop-style keyboard as well, the Digital Media Keyboard 3000.

I haven't personally used it, but it has decent reviews. Newegg sells a wireless keyboard from i-rocks which is very similar to older non-chiclet laptop keyboards. They are however very expensive, and I don't personally like the aesthetic. Apple's keyboards have a style almost identical to the popuplar 'chiclet' style of keyboard found on many laptops today. If you are looking for a keyboard which feels like a laptop keyboard, there are some that exist. This is not an industry-standard connection, and varies from laptop to laptop. Here is an image of a keyboard being replaced you can see how the keyboard is attached by a narrow ribbon cable. Internal keyboards typically use a PS/2 interface, but the connectors are not designed in such a way that they could be used easily externally from the laptop. Before you know it, he had a full-blown open source project on his hands. He got the Trackpoint working, and along the way managed to add support for a number of other laptop boards as well. I use a Teensy microcontroller mounted on a connector board to take over this function.įrank Adams liked the keyboard on his Lenovo ThinkPad T61 so much that he decided to design an adapter so he could use it over USB with the Teensy microcontroller. The author has tested a wide variety of keyboard models, including Dell Inspiron, HP Presario, Sony Vaio, and IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad.Ī typical laptop keyboard relies on the motherboard for the scanning circuitry. Here is a solution to enable laptop bottom case keyboards as USB keyboards using a Teensy microcontroller.

Use external keyboard with laptop