Computer Side Hardware:

 

            The computer side hardware is shown in the figure below.  The computer connects to the microcontroller through a 6-pin min-DIN plug and provides power to run both the microcontroller and the receiver, thus there is no need for any batteries.  The

specification for keyboards is that they should draw no more than 100mA, which is sufficient for our purposes.  The Clock line connects to pin 5 of PORTA and the Data line connects to pin 4 of PORTA on the microcontroller.  These pins are always set to input with pull up resistors so that the Clock line and Data line are pulled high when the lines are idle.  We use a 510 Ohm resistor to connect the Clock line to pin 7 of PORTA and another 510 Ohm resistor to connect the Data line to pin 6 of PORTA. We use these resistors so that we can pull the Clock and Data lines low using pins 7 and 6 respectively without shorting pins 5 and 4 to ground and burning out the port pins.  The microcontroller receives data from the wireless keyboard using the Radiotronix receiver (RCR-433-RP).  The data output of the receiver is passed to the RXD pin of the microcontroller.  As a result, the UART handles all the signal reception in the background for us.  Like for the transmitter, we use a dipole antenna made from a piece of wire that is about 2 feet long.