Do this pcb board will work with BB 9900 bold keyboard?

[bladyle]

I have only BB 9900 that want to use for something like this. They look like same but not sure about the layout and other things.

[Dakkaron]

Out of the box it doesn't no. The BlackBerry Bold 9900 has a different connector (same type but 40pin instead of 28pin). The pinout on the connector differs. The internal layout is quite different too (BB9900 has a 7x7 layout, while the BBQ10 has a 5x7 layout).

The BB9900 also integrates a touchpad while the BBQ10 integrates a microphone (which I don't use).

It would be possible to adapt the Fairberry to work with the BB9900 keyboard.

The steps would be:

• Swap the connector in the design from the BM14B(0.8)-24DS-0.4V(52) to the BM20B(0.8)-40DS-0.4V(51)
• In the design rewire the rows and columns so that the pinout matches and all rows and columns are used. This will take up 2 more pins, but that's ok, the Fairberry has 6 unused pins (A1, A2, A3, A4, SDA, SCL)
• Optionally (and ideally), wire up the touchpad too, to make it functional. This will require 5 more pins, two of them I2C pins, and a voltage level shifter to 1.8V. This is getting into a more tight spot, since that's one more pin than we have. But it's ok, we can re-use one of the SPI pins which are only used for initial flashing of the device. Re-wire that to one of the rows or columns, Just means you aren't allowed to press a button during initial flashing.
• Implement a touchpad driver in Arduino
• Adapt the layout in the Fairberry firmware to use the touchpad and the 7x7 internal layout

All in all, maybe 10h of work.

[Dakkaron]

Btw, you can get Q10 keyboards on Aliexpress for ~€5

[bladyle]

Thank you for your detailed explanation! So they are quite different, and I think the steps required for rewiring are more advanced than I’m comfortable with. I also didn’t know that BB10 keyboards don’t have a touchpad — for me, the touchpad is convenient to use. I’ll check AliExpress for Q10 keyboards and consider whether I should get one.