I was wondering if anyone’s used a Cypress FX2LP chip as the heart of a keyboard?
I have a cheap CY7C68013A devboard for another project, and other applications started crossing my mind. A quick search hasn’t turned up any high-profile projects or firmware supporting this chip, but it seems both pretty simple to program and reasonably plentiful.
Well I guess that’s a resounding “no”! I may have some time on my hands in about a month, so if I come up with anything I’ll post about it…
Sorry for the late answer on your particular question.
This controller is using an 8052 CPU at it’s heart.
While it may be a suitable controller for a keyboard in general, it may not be suited for you to make a keyboard PCB with it.
Let me explain why below.
Writing a keyboard firmware is not something obvious, takes time to have something very basic, and nowadays people are using firmware helpers/libraries like QMK or ZMK to do all the tedious work.
And those libraries have a limited MCU support, QMK beeing the most restrictive (Atmel, STM32 or RP2040 MCUs) and ZMK having a bit wider array of possibilities outside of ARM CPUs (but still not your Cypress MCU).
But if your goal is to learn how to use the chip and write firmware yourself, then go ahead !
Thanks, yes I figured I wasn’t going to be using any off-the-shelf frameworks with this device, but I was curious to know if anyone had used it at all.
(One of my previous projects looks a lot like keyboard firmware - it involved scanning a Commodore 64 keyboard matrix and generating PS/2 scancodes - so starting from scratch isn’t a dealbreaker.)