The other day, I picked up 2 Dell Latitude e5530's from the trash (more or less), and tested them out. Neither had hard drives, and both had some basic wear and tear. However, one of them had a damaged charging port, and I couldn't get it to work, and even when I tried switching it out with the perfectly good cable from the second laptops port, it didn't work, so I took apart that laptop.
From the good laptop, I charged it up, ran the setup utility, and found the laptop to be in perfect working condition, except minus anything to boot too. I have since ordered a hard drive and a Ubuntu disk which are coming tomorrow to turn that computer into a working laptop. (for the small price of $60 (hard drive+disk) *pumps fist*). So I may post anything about that computer in the future, but for now, my questions are about the second, broken, computer.

I salvaged the ram stick (put it in the first laptop for a total of 8 GB), the LCD, the WLAN card, the fan, the battery, and the SD and EC card placeholders (dust blockers?), as well as leaving the main body of the laptop intact. I ripped out the motherboard, the other circuit boards, and the broken optical drive, and screwed the main body of the laptop back together, with out the screen, so it was just the laptop piece, albeit hollow. I maintained the integrity of the keyboard component, so if I remove it, it is just a keyboard with the ribbon cables on the back connecting to a small circuit board, which used to have a ribbon cable to the motherboard.

It would be totally awesome If I could somehow wire the keyboard component to be a USB keyboard or something like that, so I could screw it back into the laptop half body and have a cool looking keyboard.
But I have no idea whether that is possible, feasible, or done before (I have guesses that people have probably done it), so I was wondering if anyone on this site had any insight on making this hope a reality.

For reference, the text on the back of the keyboard is as follows:

Chicony P/N.:MP-10H23USJ698W
Compal P/N.:PK130FH2D00
Rev.:A00
S/N.:13D112801085M
(and on the sticker below that:)
CN-07T425-75525-
34O-E0U5-A00
DP/N:07T425
Made in China
MP-10H2
(and then lower, printed directly on the backing of the component:)
MP_10H2US_A ☑
MP_10H2J0_A ⧠


Here is a pic of the back of the keyboard, where the information I just described would be to the right:



Any insight on this project (project?) would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Some quick Google-fu reveals the following:

Laptop keyboards are just a raw key matrix; there are no driving electronics that scan for keys and produce output key codes. This is because the keyboard is close enough to the motherboard that no serialization is necessary, and it slightly reduces costs to put the keyboard controller logic on the motherboard with pretty much every other dang thing.

What this means is that the keyboard cannot do anything on its own; you need to supply external hardware that scans the key matrix for you. You could use one of the many popular microcontroller kits you can find pretty much anywhere to scan and drive the keyboard matrix yourself. That keyboard matrix has a lot of pins, so you'll probably need something to get more I/O pins, such as a simple shift register. If you're more adventurous, I'd suggest trying to repurpose a salvaged USB keyboard controller board from another USB keyboard. That, of course, might require some reverse-engineering of the controller.

And a raw key matrix, of course, means that it's more fit to be used as a PS/2 keyboard, since PS/2 has no polling. In fact, many laptops recognize the keyboard to be a PS/2 keyboard.

That's . . . quite wrong. PS/2 keyboards also have internal key scanning logic, which polls the key matrix. The PS/2 link sends key codes back to the computer. If PS/2 keyboards didn't have internal scanning logic, the PS/2 connector would be a giant, thick cable like an old parallel port.

Laptop motherboards may well have a generic PS/2 controller for the keyboard. Or, it could just be the system firmware tricking the OS into thinking it's a PS/2 keyboard. Given that chipsets are likely to have native PS/2 support, the former seems more likely.