As they say, “if you paint the gray hair” you will remember what old keyboards looked like and the problems they caused due to various factors. The technology has evolved a lot and solved all the problems in this aspect, now focusing on performance and general quality, as well as small innovations, but how did they do it? like a keyboard manages to avoid an effect like Phantom? Let’s see.
First, a brief introduction to the Ghosting effect to understand how keyboards manage to avoid it completely in the vast majority of models. The Ghost on a keyboard It is an effect that produces the non-registration of keystrokes on the keyboard when its matrix reaches a certain number of keys when pressed at the same time. How does a keyboard prevent this?
The Ghosting effect on a keyboard and its solution
If the keyboard as a rule has a limit of pressed keys and we press more, these will not be registered and therefore they are classified as “ghosts”, hence the name of the term. But as in everything, there is a limit for the before and another for the after, the second being the one that varies.
On most keyboards, you can only press one maximum 6 keys at the same time because each key represents one byte, but a keyboard’s input and HID protocol only supports 8 bytes As such. The answer to the two missing bytes comes from reserving the modified keycaps for special or FN functions plus the reserving keys as such, specific for specific tasks such as Control, for example.
Therefore, and knowing this, the solution is to launch a technology that doesn’t have these limitations, but how do you do that if you have to adhere to the same protocols and total records? The answer is simple and ingenious at the same time.
Initiation protocol and reporting protocol
The solution came with NKRO, a technology that increased the number of bytes available for each record up to 64 through adherence to HID protocols to add a larger bus with start and report protocol.
To easily understand it, now each key is scanned independently without having a maximum as such, although there are really 64 of them, two of which are still registered for the aforementioned tasks. But then, how are we going to be able to press all the keys if there are more than 62 on any modern full-size keyboard?
Even more ingenuity here, because to overcome this limitation, the keyboards include small ARM processors that emulate two HID keyboards, dividing its matrix into two well-assigned parts, so that if higher keystrokes are needed for the reason that In in other words, the processor works and emulates two keyboards for the same USB, allowing full keystrokes.
As you can see, these little 32-bit ARM processors Added to system memory, they make today’s small “PC” keyboards really powerful considering the many options they have today, far beyond systems or RGB keys.
