Dongles to Fake Presence of a Keyboard?

Posted by Cliff on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:30PM 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?

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Re:Not terribly helpful, but ... by fuzzybunny · 2004-07-12 22:53 · 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?

--
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Read another way... by stevef · 2004-07-13 00:41 · 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 :)