TTYpewriter!

Converting electronic typewriters to terminals

Current Hardware in use:

• Arduino Mega R3 + Wifi.

  • ATMega2560: handles the interfacing to the typewriter, should act as a dumb terminal in it's own right.
  • ESP8266: bridges our dumb terminal to an external webserver.

• Canon Typestar 7 Typewriter

  • This can be any digital typewriter - I chose this because it was cheap, but there's a lot of information about it online thanks to Alex Dueppen

Plan/progress

• Stage One: Keyboard

  • Read and interpret keystrokes from typewriter keyboard, print to serial
  • Implement function keys ('code', 'backspace', 'left'/'right', etc.)

• Stage Two: Dumb Terminal

  • Set up basic terminal on mega
  • Detect Keyboard scan pulses and set corresponding rows/cols high to simulate keystrokes
  • add ability to switch between typewriter (passthrough) and terminal (only print RX/echo) modes

• Stage Three: TTY

  • Set up client for protocol of choice (TBD, possibly Telnet or SSH) on ESP8266.

• Other Goals:

  • Expand Keyboard maps to provide compatibility for more typewriters