[GTALUG] Emulating a USB keyboard using ???

[Giles Orr]

On 5 December 2015 at 22:01, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 01:47:26PM -0500, Stewart Russell wrote:
>> On Dec 5, 2015 10:39, "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Raspberry pi can NOT do it, since it has a permanent USB hub connected
>>
>> The Model A, Compute Module, and Raspberry Pi Zero *can* do it, but will
>> need some kernel fiddling to enable gadget mode.
>
> True, I forgot about the A.

I talked to Jason Kridner at the last Penguicon (Science Fiction and
Linux convention in Detroit) - Kridner is the main guy behind the
BeagleBone.  He expressed an interest in helping me out with something
I've wanted for a long, long time: he said it would be easy to turn
the BeagleBone Black into a keyboard converter, ie. you type Dvorak on
a standard keyboard and the inline-USB BBB turns it into standard
Qwerty.  This is a little like using a bulldozer to move a pebble, but
computing power is so cheap these days and the BBB is equipped for the
job ...

Sadly (for me, anyway) he didn't get around to writing the code and
has (per his public posts) recently become a father, so I'm not
expecting this to come to anything.  But the point remains: generating
keyboard output to USB shouldn't be too difficult from the BBB.

If you have a BBB I think it would be worth considering, but if you're
starting from zero an Arduino Nano or Teensy might be better (the
Teensy is used in the Ergodox keyboard project).  A quick search
turned up these:

http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/blog/leostick-dev-kit-review---the-tiny-arduino-clone

https://www.tindie.com/products/digistump/digispark-the-tiny-arduino-enabled-usb-dev-board/

They looks like the ideal form factor for the kind of project you're discussing?

Sorry this isn't coming from expertise in the area, but I've had a
long-time peripheral interest so I hope this may help a little.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com