Hello All;

I am working to modify a LeapFrog toy which is a book with buttons and a speaker. It is this model.

The buttons on the book pages is actually a sheet of a membrane with a ribbon cable popping out the back to a main board. The issue I am running into is addressing these buttons. The 9 buttons go into a black chip-on-board and produce only 6 pins which feed into the main board. Image here: https://imgur.com/a/dJSquWq

I assume this chip is to help provide additional voltage for the ribbon cable to run the extra length. However, does anyone know if there is there a way arduino can use these 6 pins to address the buttons, and how would I go about identifying how these work?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Hello All;

I am working to modify a LeapFrog toy which is a book with buttons and a speaker. It is this model.

The buttons on the book pages is actually a sheet of a membrane with a ribbon cable popping out the back to a main board. The issue I am running into is addressing these buttons. The 9 buttons go into a black chip-on-board and produce only 6 pins which feed into the main board. Image here: https://imgur.com/a/dJSquWq

I assume this chip is to help provide additional voltage for the ribbon cable to run the extra length. However, does anyone know if there is there a way arduino can use these 6 pins to address the buttons, and how would I go about identifying how these work?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

What kind of test equipment do you have? Oscilloscope, multimeter, etc? If you're lucky, it might be a simple multiplexing arrangement that you can mimic with an Arduino. If fear not though - I'm guessing the black blob has a proprietary chip underneath and that there's some digital communication protocol between it and the main controller, maybe SPI or I2C, but who knows. If it's something like that, it would be very difficult to reverse engineer.

 

Hey, thanks for your reply.

I have very limited equipment beyond a stady hand, dedication to the craft of this project and a soldering gun with stand, arms, etc. I have taken more pictures of the project and it seems that it may be easier than I initially thought.

The 9 buttons are behind a thin film that each correspond to a pin. The trouble now is connecting to this set of pins. I have an idea, but would love to find out the sandwich connector of the button matrix. Soldering to it has proven impossible. it is a physical connection which smushes (best choice of words here) the contacts to the main board.