HP-41CL Remote Keyboard / Scripting

[rocket.scientist]

(04-16-2021 06:27 AM)Hans Brueggemann Wrote:  it's always a litlle dangerous to jump into solution space too early, but with a HP-41C wand "at hand" it shouldn't be too difficult to connect a keyboard to an arduino and let it decode the keyboard entries into barcode that flashes an LED into the wand to control the HP-41C.
so that would at least free you from reverse engineering the ROM.

now if you want to go via HPIL, J-F's PIL-IO board comes to mind for generating with some extra HW the barcode flashes from HPIL data. why keeping the wand in this picture? afaik, the HP-41C can be HPIL master only, which might be a limitation when trying to take full control over it with a direct HPIL to HPIL connection, say, a HP-75C connected as "keyboard" to the HP-41C.

So this is relevant, and part of what is in my mind as a simpler solution than re-writing the HP-IL module to allow control of a 41C. For me, I can barely spell HP-IL, much less rewrite code. :-)

It does strike me as curious why, assuming optical coupling to a wand is so simple, why someone has not already done it. I did find others asking about remotely controlling a 41C keyboard and nobody had a good answer.

I do have J-F's wonderful PIL-Box, and am now curious if the PIL-IO has enough bandwidth to flash a LED with sufficient speed. Not having one to play with I am assuming it would be one command to turn the LED on, and another to turn it off a few milliseconds later. I may need to wait for him to chime in here.

Thanks for the suggestion here.

-Pat (KG5YPQ)