Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Wireless keyboard for older macs


Many years ago a company was selling Wireless ADB keyboards for Macs for $20 or so - they originally retailed for over $119.95.

I bought one off eBay and played with it a little bit. The Macs I tried it with didn't really benefit from it because they were on a desk that worked fine with regular, attached keyboard.

For a Media Center however, a wireless keyboard is a necessity.

The keyboard is truly plug and play - it needs two AA batteries, but there are no drivers necessary.

The little coin sized button in the upper right is actually the mouse. Unfortunately it is a little slow - I'll try installing the Speedy Mouse extension tonight to see if it helps.

I've also tried this keyboard on newer Macs using a USB-ADB adapter and it works fine.

One downside that I've read about the keyboard is that it doesn't have a power button - so if the Mac you attach it to only has soft power on - you'll need to also keep a regular keyboard attached to the machine to boot it up.

The 6100 is fairly unique among vintage Macs in that it has "hard power" - you need to push in a button to boot it - keyboard power doesn't work. So in this case the negative aspect of the keyboard is negated by the fact that the 6100 can't use soft power on anyway.

The receiver for the keyboard is fairly unobtrusive. It's infrared - which is good and bad. The bad news is that you have to be aiming the keyboard in the general direction of the receiver. (Specs say 30 foot line of site, 15 foot at an angle.) No controlling the Mac from another room or anything.

The good news is that infrared is "learnable" by universal remotes and PDAs. I haven't tried "learning" every single key yet, but early tests with certain keys worked like a charm. Straight control of the Mac from a PDA - no dongles, web hacks, bluetooth or anything else - pretty cool!

I've been curious about infrared repeaters, etc. Some of them work by putting a little RF transmitter inside a AA sized battery and then using that to transmit the signals to a little device that has an antenna and an infrared transmitter. For my situation - the TV is about 8 feet away from the couch so I don't need it.

No comments: