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Dongles to Fake Presence of a Keyboard?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have a Compaq IPAQ desktop system (legacy free) that will not boot headless. (Yes I did try to tell the BIOS to not generate a no keyboard error, but there is no such setting for the BIOS of this system.) Since I would like to use it such and don't wish to waste a keyboard just to keep it from complaining, I'd like to come up with a small dongle that would fake the system into thinking that there is a keyboard attached. This is the same basic thing that KVM's do, so the circuit shouldn't be that difficult to find. Has anyone heard of such a thing? Can anyone provide or point to somewhere where I can find the basic circuit for this?"
How hard would it be to take the connector part from a old non-working keyboard and wiring something like this up?
I can't imagine such a dongle could be cheaper than picking up a really cheap and nasty keyboard. Here in the UK, you can regularly get keyboards for 2GBP at computer fairs.
You'll also have the added advantage of having a keyboard attached to machine, just in case.
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
The keyboard has a small microcontroller and the protocol the keyboard uses with the PC is quite tricky and usually the check to see if a keyboard is plugged in (PS/2 and AT) includes protocol checks
so you might aswell solder the chip free from a keyboard and stick it with a plug in a housing. BTW, if you are asking this correctly the system is NOT legacy-free, legacy-free would mean no PS/2 plugs.
Open old KB. Cut away everything except the controller chip and the traces between it and where the cable enters.
The latest Slashdot meme.
(link in Danish. Product #2.
Keyboard Emulator @ Froogle
Read The Fucking Internet? Have you actually done some research before coming and asking us here? Or is slashdot just some general first-line helpdesk for your computer needs?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
How hard would it be to just use the old non-working keyboard itself?
Replace the BIOS with Linux BIOS or with Open BIOS. There might even be an update from Compaq/HP.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm usually one of the first in line when it comes time to try and make something, but this request seems like too much bother compared to the alternatives.
I have run into the no-keyboard-present error when trying to convert an old desktop machine into a headless file server.
A bios upgrade gave me the ability to ignore the keyboard error.
Perhaps you should investigate that first.
I had a similar problem when I was given a computer, although it had to have a mouse also. Nevermind the fact that I was putting OpenBSD on the machine to be a dedicated web/mail server and didn't have any plans to install anything that needed a mouse
What I ended up doing was just getting a cheap mouse, coiling it up around itself, and throwing it behind the tower
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Saw one at Staples this weekend for $9.88.
A few years back I bought a brand new, 15 year old IBM keyboard for around $20. (original, sealed, old box) I wish I'd bought more, because nothing beats the feel of the old IBM keyboards.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Way 1:
Get a working receiver for a cordless keyboard. You do not need the actual keyboard, or a mouse. It also does not matter wheater it works with infrared or radio. Plug it into the computer. Finished. (If you are paranoid, you wrap a radio receiver into grounded tin foil to build a faraday cage, thus eleminating all incoming transmissions from wireless keyboards around. For infrared, some layers of duct tape across the infrared receiver should be sufficient, but tin foil will also do the job.)
Way 2:
Get a really, really, really cheep, but working keyboard (at least one key should work as expected). Open the case. Use brute force if needed. You should find a small printed circuit board (PCB) with one chip and three (or more) LEDs, it should be connected to a keyboard matrix made mostly of transparent foil. Rip off the keyboard matrix, throw away everything except the PCB and the keyboard cable. Place the PCB in a small case, or wrap it into duct tape. Connect the keyboard cable to the computer. Finished.
(Note: If you are really out of luck, the entire keyboard IS a PCB, or even worse, the entire keyboard is made of plastic foil, including the part carrying the chip and LEDs. In this case, getting another keyboard is the easiest way.)
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
1. Plug in any old keyboard.
2. Boot computer
3. Whip out keyboard
4. Don't turn computer off
Howabout flashing with a new bios ?
...
http://www.linuxbios.org/
That might be a fun thing to do
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
How can I spend more money and time to fabricate a fake keyboard dongle rather than "waste" a $5 USB keyboard bought on ebay? What a geek. And I mean that in the best sense of the word :)
There are several open source BIOSs floating around now (Google returns a plethora). If there is no BIOS upgrade for your system, you might try finding an open one which works with your system.
Personally I've never tried it, so I'd like to hear how it goes.
Get one of these super cheap keyboards. A few screws hold this together and the intenals are just printed on plastic sheets. The PCB with the controller is about 2" x 3". Wrap it in electrical tape and just stick it to the back ot the case (or hide it inside). One warning, these keyboards suck, so don't try to actually type on them.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
You can get a small microcontroller (such as an 8-pin AVR AT90S2323) and create a firmware that speaks enough of the PS/2 protocol to be recognized as a keyboard. The parts count should be fairly low, probably just the PS/2 plug, the microcontroller, and a ceramic resonator. The micrcontroller I mentioned has an internal I/O pullups.
w ord_is_id=1&keywords=46
You're likely to end up with a spare I/O port on that 8-pin microcontroller, so you could expand the design to include a button that sends ctrl+alt+del (or, for linux, alt+sysrq sequences to unmount and reboot), or an LED caps-lock indicator that you could control from software on the PC. With the AT90S2343 you would get rid of the external clock and get 2 additional I/O ports
Here's an existing project with source (license unclear) that uses AVR and emulates the PS2 keyboard protocol:
http://www.avrfreaks.net/Freaks/freakshow.php?key
http://members.rogers.com/nlange/avrStuff.html
AVR microcontrollers are great. Few external parts, lots of documentation, develop with the GNU toolchain (including a fairly complete C library), and easy-to-build "SPI" programming hardware
Why on earth was this deemed Flamebait? Other people have mentioned the open-source and Linux BIOS projects available.
I use a headless box when I DJ. I run remote desktop on my laptop so I don't have to haul my huge ass monitor with me.
I had a keyboard go bad so I pulled the controller out, cut the cord short and soldered it all together. Works great.
While it's nice to say that, it's generally not doable.
LinuxBIOS has one Compaq machine in their list. Not only is it not the one that the person posting has (it's an Alpha), it's also unsupported.
OpenBIOS's main page includes the following quote: "Jens Axboe wrote an IDE driver for OpenBIOS. This will help OpenBIOS to boot on real hardware soon."
That's from January of this year, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Look for the cheapest keyboard around or use one with malfunctioning keys and strip the controller board, toss away the keys and voila!
Just a little cable hanging in the back of the pc.
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
Just by the least expensive wireless keyboard (or at least the part that connects to the PC either by USB or PS/2) you can find. You can pick up one here from eBay. Becareful, those $0.01 priced keyboards come with $18 or $35 of shipping. You got to love the honest sellers on eBay. :D
I would guess just plugging in a adaptor that allows you to use a old PS/2 keyboard via USB would work just great. Probably not too expensive either.
--
Open Source Government - http://www.technocracy.ca
savethedollhouse.com
Here's another suggestion. Check out some garage sales. This is summer, so they'll be going on every weekend. Just check your local paper. Probably about half the garage sales I've been to have some computer parts there--mouse for a buck, keyboard for a buck, etc. I just ran a fundraising garage sale at our church this past weekend. There were several mice, computer speakers, monitors, joystick, Gravis gamepad. I sold a whole computer I was downgrading because of a better one I got.
My cool story on that was that someone brought an 18.1 inch flat panel monitor with the suggestion, "Maybe someone can fix it." I wasn't going to put a known broken monitor out there for sale, so I took it home and checked it out. It would power on, but it looked like nothing going on, until I shined a flashlight on it--burned out backlight. So I'll be putting in some money to get that replaced and have cheap LCD display.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I was thinking about a similiar idea, that involves USB. I've been looking for information on how the computer recognizes USB devices. Is there a circuit in there that sends some unique identifier to the system? Where is it, and what do the strings look like that it sends to the computer? Does anyone have any information on this sort of thing? I have tried google searches BTW, but I can't find anything specific regarding to the identification of USB hardware.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Here's a better suggestion. Go over to a friend's house and take his or her's. Keyboards fit nicely underneath a coat.
There is a bios patch called no_f1 that compaq put out for some of their systems to allow for headless operation, I've used it on some of my older machines. google it and good luck!
http://www.solutions-cubed.com/solutions%20cube
$30. Connect to keyboard port (These are AT, so you may need a $2 PS2->AT adaptor)
These units are designed to take input from a 4x4 matrix keypad, and you program them to send keycodes. Just skip that step. It will handle pretending to be a keyboard that never sends anything.
You can also wire up a keypad to perform 'shutdown' 'reboot' etc features if that would be handy and not a security issue for you.
Not a good idea. On a lot of old boxes, unplugging the keyboard when the system is on zaps the keyboard port, effectively RUINING the motherboard.
Jay | http://oldos.org
Wouldn't a PS/2 CueCat look like a keyboard?
Not only does this look somewhat like a dongle, but you get another red LED for the server room.
Several machines around here have the option in the bios to not look for the keyboard on startup.
Since most rackmount systems now are just ATX boards in a rackmount case I would not think this is all that of an uncommon option. Look and you may have a no charge fix for your problem
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think this would be a good idea/product! It could make servers in a public are more secure. Without the keyboard the users can't use that old PC acting as a printserver (or whatever) as a workstation. Even if I booted Knoppix or NT recovery console I wouldn't be able to do anything until I found a keyboard.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
You could probably make one pretty cheap, I was using a KVM on my secondary monitor. Two PCs with two monitors. The problem I had was the KVM didn't have an external power source, it got the power from the keyboard port.
:)
Get a USB to PS/2 converter and stick a resistor into one or more of the PS/2 holes, that will probably trick the computer into thinking there's a keyboard there. Though I may be totally wrong
it's a sig, wtf?
http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html
Nothing to hang out of the back. Been around for awhile and is well thought of.
Many wireless keyboards come with a fully functional PS/2 (or USB) base. Whether the keyboard is present or not, the simple presence of the base is sufficient to get past the BIOS.
I picked up one from CompUSA a few years ago for about $20. The keyboard has since died, but the base still works fine for my server. Remember, the keyboard quality doesn't matter here. Who cares if the wireless has a range of two feet if you don't want it for its wireless abilities?
IR has the advantage of allowing keyboard access when you want it too. Or, if you absolutely don't want it, duct tape on the photoreceptor works wonders.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Too bad the person who posted it first was AC and so the answer may never be seen.
To recap, buy a cheap wireless keyboard. If you do it Eeeeeeeee-bay, watch for shipping charges.
Our local Portland Oregon USA computer recycler FreeGeek is selling used PS2 keyboards for about a dollar each.
However that doesn't really address the issue of avoiding having to have a keyboard inserted to boot the PC. I have been looking into this issue recently and found that an inexpensive microcontroller can reproduce keyboard signals quite easily. The Atmel AVR Tiny11 sells at DigiKey for $0.41 each in quantity 25 and $0.56 in quantity one. It's an 8 pin DIP that runs at 1 MHz with no external parts. Its Flash memory holds 512 instructions and it has 32 registers. The companion chip, the AVR Tiny 12, sells for $1.10 quantity 25 and can be programmed directly from the PC parallel port. The PIC controllers from Microchip Inc. have devices in the same price/performance range, but they are more difficult to develop software for and they need external programmers to write the code into their Flash memory.
It's necessary to know what bytes the PC sends to the keyboard on power-up and what the keyboard sends back to the PC. Then these bytes can be formatted by the dongle and sent to the PC to mimic a keyboard.
The PC keyboard has weird programming. Each key sends at least one byte when pressed and some send two or more. When released the same byte set is resent preceeded by the byte 0xf0.
Now any Slashdotter, when given the job of encoding a keyboard with less than 128 individual keys, would assign a 7-bit scan code to each key with the high bit either set or clear depending on whether the key was pressed or released. Simple and elegant. But the standard PC keyboard has this strange multibyte configuration that makes it difficult to decode the keypresses. Not to mention that there is no way to turn off the auto-repeat for the entire keyboard.
Nevertheless, the keyboard scancodes are standardized throughout the world. And there are hundreds of millions of keyboards out there. The newer ones only use about 13 milliAmps of power.
I developed an AVR program to take the PS2 keypresses and mimic a MIDI keyboard by sending note on/off messages according to the keypresses. I'm surprised at how well it works. Except for a few key combinations that don't register together, the PS2 keyboard can function like a MIDI music keyboard (without velocity and aftertouch detection, of course). For a few dollars, I have a small light portable keyboard that plugs into a tone module and adds hundreds of musical instrument sounds to small music group jams. This application is posted on www.avrfreaks.org in the user projects section of the Academy forum.
Then, I strolled into CompUSA and saw this Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo. The PS2 connectors stay plugged into the machine and the (nice, UFO-shaped, blinking-light) receiver stays duct-taped to the top of the machine.
All I need to do is remember to take the keyboard and mouse along with me to the colo facility when I need to make a personal visit.
WWW
That lovely BIOS error message, "Keyboard not found, press [F1] to continue" is sitting in many BIOSes since the PC-XT times up to this day. Perhaps, because it is copyrighted?
There you are, staring at me again.
I'm not sure if this would be practical for you, especially considering that small form-factor cases like the iPaq are hard to manuever inside anyway, but there may be a way to rewire the PS/2 port so that it is shorted into thinking that there is a keyboard there. That may be too permanent for you, but I work on a robotics team, and we have some plugs that we have shorted temporarily with a paperclip. That might look a little weird, and isn't necessarily the best or safest idea, but it is dirt cheap. Finding which pins to jam it in would be the hard part, best to check a wiring diagram for PS/2 ports on Google, rather than the ol' guess-and-check on a computer.
:google:
- ickna http://www.ickna.com
My god man, a keyboard can be had for less than $5! Do you know how much a similar dongle would cost?!?!?
Just use a cheap microcontroller, perhaps a PIC. They are pretty simple to get the hang of, just a handful of RISC instructions, and they're cheap. All the protocol information is available readily
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
Some KVM Switches have KVM dungles that you can buy seperately. This is what we are currently using, and you can get the dungle here . Although the dungles are much more expansive then actual keyboards.
I also found this on a good old google search. The APKME adapter seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
A Desktop KVM switch is a lot cheaper, but it might be a bit unsightly.
Buy a PS/2 to AT style keyboard adapter. Take a 10K ohm resistor. Shove it into pin-holes 4 and 5 on the AT side of the connection (these are the two "middle" pins when looking at it vertically). Plug it into the system. Boot.
Works on most motherboards. Occassionally you'll find one it won't work with, but with the vast majority of them it works fine.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Buy a couple of $5 keyboards, a really crap, silent one will probably be the best, no extra lights or anything like that.
Take them apart (there one IC and some plastic crap inside, with horrible contacts and a circuit board)
There's usually just flat strip with a few contact on one corner of the plastic crap that connect to the circuit board, you should be able to pull them apart.
A page with some good pics
Now you've got a smallish circuitboard, that you can probably tape up and house inside your pc.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Wouldn't a USB to PS2 adaptor (without a keyboard attached to it) be enough to fool the BIOS that there's a keyboard present? Those can be fairly small, not quiet dongle sized, but maybe close enough for you?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I saw this post and thought "Hey! I could use one of these" and a 6 post mini din with a 10k resistor is less than 3 bucks.
I stopped by Frys on the way home and picked up a baggy of 10k's and a pair of 6 pin mini dins and gave it a shot. I made two of them (just in case I flubbed the soldering in my excitement for cheap keyboard fakers). Neither one worked on systems that I turned on the 'halt on all errors' option in the bios. I tried turning off the 'turn on numlock on boot' options and this didn't make a difference. It looks like the systems are a little smarter than all that. The packet came with 4 resistors in it so I'll probably stop by again tomorrow and try this with an AT connector hooked to a ps2-AT converter and see how it goes.
Would have been nice if it worked though . . . If anyone has confirmed this to work (and proving once and for all that Stevie Wonder could do a better job at soldering than me) please post!
Maybe not, but the page is marked "Copyright 2000, Middle Digital Incorporated." If it is a troll site, it's remarkably well done.
This gives all of the benefits of a dongle, plus you can use a program like ixbiff to flash the LEDs when you have new mail waiting.
More often I'll just take an old keyboard (the one with the missing spacebar and the keycaps worn to bare plastic), plug it in, and shove it behind the PC where it's unlikely anything will accidentally hit the keys. Big plus is you can still drag it out when a "three finger salute" is needed.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
So, everybody on here seems to be shouting "just get a cheapo keyboard," and it's true you can find one for 10 bucks or less (USB, remeber the post said "legacy free"). There are keyboard emulators out there for $40-$50, definitely more than even a decent quality keyboard.
However, there are circumstances where you don't WANT a keyboard hooked up: to prevent keys from being pressed inadvertently or by unauthorized people; to save space; because mgt. won't accept a homebrew project; or maybe to prevent keyboard theft.
The best idea I've heard so far (props to another poster) is to use a wireless keyboard and mouse; the receiver stays on the server, plugged in and you take the keyboard and mouse away with you. If security is a concern, get a set that connects via IR instead of radio, and put black tape over the eyes.
Now this is off topic, but Avocent makes wireless KVM switch components, to allow you to KVM to distant computers without the mess of wires.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Hope this still reaches the original requestor, but...
There is a hidden setting in most compaq bioses that lets you boot headless.
Take the following steps:
- go into the bios
- set a power-on password
- a new option will appear, probably "password options"
- here you can set "Network Server Mode" to enabled
- reboot, remove keyboard and behold!
Good luck.
Having a keyboard attached to a system is not always an advantage. In fact, for a HEADLESS system, which is what the article writer wants, having a keyboard attached is a huge liability with zero benefits.
The point is not to be cheap. The point is to prevent local access.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Take an old ps/2 mouse and a ps/2 to AT adapter (if you need that type of connector) and attach it to the keyboard port.
Maybe it's not the answer you were looking for, but at least you get to put that old ball-mouse to use again.
"Lame" - Galaxar
I spent last December doing Vac work at a company doing just that. I'd never touched hardware before, but between a friend that I suckered into joining me and myself, we put together an emulator that could not only fake being a keyboard, but also was fully hot-pluggable etc.
The annoying part is that your mouse runs on the same lines as your keyboard - you need to watch for that so that you can abort if it's pulling lines low etc.
All that being said though, your best bet is just ripping out the chip in an old keyboard - it's guaranteed to work.