External Keyboards For Sl5500, Has anyone got any standard keyboards to Options

[sdjf]

Wouldn't it be great if you could just plug your desktop keyboard at work into your Z, instead of having to lug an extra keyboard along in your pack?

Has anyone had any luck with external keyboards for the sl5500, that were not specifically designed for the Zaurus, and not IR? If you had luck, on what ROM?

I tried getting a ps2 keyboard to work via Sharp's serial port at the bottom of my sl5500, and failed with a number of drivers. The best I could do was get the ps2 keyboard's lights to flash on when I sent a break, and I couldn't get any signals from the keyboard to be recognized by my console.

The keyboard was an Adesso ACK-595 from http://www.adesso.com, which I chose because of it's small, solid design, and was advertized to be a "plug-N-play" standard Windows95 and Windows98 compatible keyboard.

I attached it to my serial port using the
serial-to-ps2 adapter cable from
http://www.serialio.com (it may not be listed on their site but they still have them). The serialio people said the cable worked fine for attachingbarcode scanners to zaurii using their "Serial Magic" product, but that does not necessarily mean theserial I/O port can also work for a ps2 keyboard on ROM 2.38.

I do know that power was getting to the keyboard, as when I hit ctrl-C on my sl5500's built-in keyboard, all the lights on the since-returned Adesso did flash on briefly.

My hunch is that the Z just didn't send enough power out the serial port, although how did the lights flashing on at all if that was the problem? Was there maybe a surge when I shut down the connection?

Has anyone seen any standard keyboards that require less than 5 volts?

Too bad the IPAQ serial-port keyboards won't plug into the sl5500. Has anyone seen any adapter cables to make that possible?

I know people have had luck on other Zaurus models with the Ratoc host controller, but has anyone succeeded in getting it to work on an sl5500?

I would rather not to go USB if I can avoid it as a CF host controller would complicate using my CF dialup modem, which I use off and on all day, but it still would be useful to know others' experience with host controllers and USB keyboards on the sl5500.

Any help I can get with this would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
sdjf