Since PS/2 is going away (and gone already for the computers of most
interest), all commercial keyboards have to migrate. Atmel has been
selling keyboard microcontrollers with integrated USB. They've got
8051-based chips with flash and AVR-based chips without flash. What
would be handiest for me would be AVR+USB with flash.

So it's good news that Atmel is bringing out just that in their
AT90USB1286, AT90USB1287, AT90USB686 and AT90USB687.[1] Even better,
they're bringing out a little $30 board [2] that you can program
through the USB port using free PC software. The board looks to me
like it will power a nifty little chording keyboard.

The bad news is the board and the development software are apparently
not quite available yet, at least not for free download by the
unwashed masses at atmel.com. Hopefully that will soon change.

1 http://atmel.com/dyn/products/devices.asp?family_id=655
2 http://atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=3879