Interfacing Keyboard

Interfacing a Microprocessor To Keyboard

• When you press a key on your computer, you are activating a switch.
There are many different ways of making these switches.
1. Mechanical key switches
2. Membrane key switches
3. Capacitive key switches
4. Hall effect key switches
Mechanical key switches
• In mechanical-switch keys, two pieces of metal are pushed together
when you press the key.
• The actual switch elements are often made of a phosphor-bronze
alloy with gold platting on the contact areas.
• The key switch usually contains a spring to return the key to the non-
pressed position and perhaps a small piece of foam to help damp out
bouncing.
• Some mechanical key switches now consist of a molded silicon dome
with a small piece of conductive rubber on the underside.
• When a key is pressed, the rubber foam shorts two traces on the
printed-circuit board to produce the key pressed signal.
Mechanical key switches
• Mechanical switches are relatively inexpensive but they have several
disadvantages.
• First, they suffer from contact bounce. A pressed key may make and break
contact several times before it makes solid contact.
• Second, the contacts may become oxidized or dirty with age so they no longer
make a dependable connection.
• Higher-quality mechanical switches typically have a rated life time of
about 1 million keystrokes.
• The silicone dome type typically last 25 million keystrokes.
Mechanical key switches
Membrane key switches
• These switches are really a special type of mechanical switches. They
consist of a three-layer plastic or rubber sandwich.
• The top layer has a conductive line of silver ink running under each key
position.
• The bottom layer has a conductive line of silver ink running under each
column of keys.
• When u press a key, you push the top ink line through the hole to contact
the bottom ink line.
• The advantages of membrane keyboards is that they can be made as very
thin, sealed units.
• They are often used on cash registers in fast food restaurants. The lifetime
of membrane keyboards varies over a wide range.
Capacitive key switches:
• A capacitive key switch has two small metal plates on the printed circuit
board and another metal plate on the bottom of a piece of foam.
• When u press the key, the movable plate is pushed closer to fixed plate.
This changes the capacitance between the fixed plates.
• Sense amplifier circuitry detects this change in capacitance and produce a
logic level signal that indicates a key has been pressed.
• The big advantages of a capacitive switch is that it has no mechanical
contacts to become oxidized or dirty.
• A small disadvantage is the specified circuitry needed to detect the change
in capacitance.
• Capacitive key switches typically have a rated lifetime of about 20 million
keystrokes.
Hall effect key switches
• This is another type of switch which has no mechanical contact.
• It takes advantage of the deflection of a moving charge by a magnetic field.
• A reference current is passed through a semiconductor crystal between
two opposing faces.
• When a key is pressed, the crystal is moved through a magnetic field which
has its flux lines perpendicular to the direction of current flow in the
crystal.
• Moving the crystal through the magnetic field causes a small voltage to be
developed between two of the other opposing faces of the crystal.
Hall effect key switches
• This voltage is amplified and used to indicate that a key has been
pressed.
• Hall effect sensors are also used to detect motion in many electrically
controlled machines.
• Hall effect keyboards are more expensive because of the more
complex switch mechanism, but they are very dependable and have
typically rated lifetime of 100 million or more keystrokes.
Hall effect key switches
a. Membrane
b. Capacitive
c. Hall-effect
Keyboard Circuit Connections and
Interfacing
• In most keyboards, the key switches are connecting in a matrix of
rows and columns.
• We will use simple mechanical switches for our examples, but the
principle is same for other type of switches.
• Getting meaningful data from a keyboard, it requires the following
three major tasks:
1. Detect a keypress
2. Debounce the keypress
3. Encode the keypress
Keyboard Circuit Connections and
Interfacing
• Three tasks can be done with hardware, software, or a combination
of two, depending on the application.
1. Software Keyboard Interfacing:
• Circuit connection and algorithm :
• The rows of the matrix are connected to four output port lines.
• The column lines of matrix are connected to four input-port lines.
• To make the program simpler, the row lines are also connected to four input
lines.
Software Keyboard Interfacing
• When no keys are pressed, the column lines are held high by the pull-
up resistor connected to +5V.
• Pressing a key connects a row to a column.
• If a low is output on a row and a key in that row is pressed, then the
low will appear on the column which contains that key and can be
detected on the input port.
• If you know the row and column of the pressed key, you then know
which key was pressed, and you can convert this information into any
code you want to represent that key.
Software Keyboard Interfacing
• An easy way to detect if any key in the matrix is pressed is to output
0’s to all rows and then check the column to see if a pressed key has
connected a low to a column.
• In the algorithm, we first output lows to all the rows and check the
columns over and over until the column are all high.
• This is done before the previous key has been released before looking
for the next one.
• In the standard keyboard terminology, this is called two-key lockout.
Software Keyboard Interfacing
Software Keyboard Interfacing
• Once the columns are found to be all high, the program enters another
loop, which waits until a low appears on one of the columns, indicating
that a key has been pressed.
• This second loop does the detect task for us.
• A simple 20-ms delay procedure then does the debounce task.
• After the debounce time, another check is made to see if the key is still
pressed.
• If the columns are now all high, then no key is pressed and the initial
detection was caused by a noise pulse or a light brushing past a key.
• If any of the columns are still low, then the assumption is made that it was
a valid keypress.
Software Keyboard Interfacing
• The final task is to determine the row and column of the pressed key and
convert this row and column information to the hex code for the pressed
key.
• To get the row and column information, a low is output to one row and the
column are read.
• If none of the columns is low, the pressed key is not in that row.
• So the low is rotated to the next row and the column are checked again.
• The process is repeated until a low on a row produces a low on one of the
column.
• The pressed key then is in the row which is low at that time.
Software Keyboard Interfacing
• This code would not match any of the row-column codes in the table,
so after all the values in the table were checked, assigned register in
program would be decremented from 0000H to FFFFH.
• The compare decrement cycle would continue through 65,536
memory locations until, by change the value in a memory location
matched the row-column code.
• The contents of the lower byte register at that point would be passed
back to the calling routine.
• The changes are 1 in 256 that would be the correct value for one of
the pressed keys.
• You should keep an error trap in a program whenever there is a
chance for it.
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
2. Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware:
• For the system where the CPU is too busy to be bothered doing these
tasks in software, an external device is used to do them.
• One of a MOS device which can be do this is the General Instruments
AY5-2376 which can be connected to the rows and columns of a
keyboard switch matrix.
• The AY5-2376 independently detects a keypress by cycling a low
down through the rows and checking the columns.
• When it finds a key pressed, it waits a debounce time.
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
• If the key is still pressed after the debounce time, the AY5- 2376
produces the 8-bit code for the pressed key and send it out to
microcomputer port on 8 parallel lines.
• The microcomputer knows that a valid ASCII code is on the data lines,
the AY5-2376 outputs a strobe pulse.
• The microcomputer can detect this strobe pulse and read in ASCII
code on a polled basis or it can detect the strobe pulse on an
interrupt basis.
• With the interrupt method the microcomputer doesn’t have to pay
any attention to the keyboard until it receives an interrupt signal.
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
• So this method uses very little of the microcomputer time.
• The AY5-2376 has a feature called two-key rollover.
• This means that if two keys are pressed at nearly the same time, each
key will be detected, debounced and converted to ASCII.
• The ASCII code for the first key and a strobe signal for it will be sent
out then the ASCII code for the second key and a strobe signal for it
will be sent out and compare this with two-key lockout.
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
Example
• Interface a 4 * 4 keyboard with 8086 using 8255 and write an ALP for
detecting a key closure and return the key code in AL. The debounce
period for a key is 10ms. Use software debouncing technique.
DEBOUNCE is an available 10ms delay routine.
• Solution: Port A is used as output port for selecting a row of keys
while Port B is used as an input port for sensing a closed key.
• Thus the keyboard lines are selected one by one through port A and
the port B lines are polled continuously till a key closure is sensed.
• The routine DEBOUNCE is called for key debouncing.
• The key code is depending upon the selected row and a low sensed
column.
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
Keyboard Interfacing with Hardware
• The higher order lines of port A and port B are left unused.
• The address of port A and port B will respectively 8000H and 8002H
while address of CWR will be 8006H.
• The control word for this problem will be 82H.
• Code segment CS is used for storing the program code.
• Key Debounce : Whenever a mechanical push-button is pressed or
released once, the mechanical components of the key do not change
the position smoothly, rather it generates a transient response .
Flow Chart
• These transient variations may be interpreted as the multiple key
pressure and responded accordingly by the microprocessor system.
• To avoid this problem, two schemes are suggested:
• The first one utilizes a bistable multivibrator at the output of the key to
debounce .
• The other scheme suggests that the microprocessor should be made to wait
for the transient period ( usually 10ms ), so that the transient response settles
down and reaches a steady state.
• A logic ‘0’ will be read by the microprocessor when the key is pressed.
• In a number of high precision applications, a designer may have two
options- the first is to have more than one 8-bit port, read (write) the
port one by one and then from the multibyte data, the second option
allows forming 16-bit ports using two 8-bit ports and use 16-bit read
or write operations.