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Dongles to Fake Presence of a Keyboard?

Posted by Cliff on from the you-can-even-build-one-from-spare-parts dept.

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?

6 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not terribly helpful, but ... by fuzzybunny · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, but with the flight ticket to the UK and all the travel expenses it'd still come out to a pretty hefty price, no?

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  2. Re:Not terribly helpful, but ... by iMMersE · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sure the UK doesn't have a monopoly on cheap computer peripherals.

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  3. Re:RTFI by LordLucless · · Score: 2, Funny

    Right - get back to me when you finish it.

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  4. Re:Not terribly helpful, but ... by sigxcpu · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't think you could find a Keyboard for 2GBP in the US, could you?

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  5. Read another way... by stevef · · Score: 4, Funny

    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 :)

  6. Re:simply a bad idea by vbrtrmn · · Score: 2, Funny

    He said that it is non-legacy, USB shouldn't care in a modern system .. though he is using COMPAQ for some gawd awful reason, so removing a USB keyboard may format the hard drives.

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