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?

Comments

Not terribly helpful, but ...

[iMMersE]

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.

Re:Not terribly helpful, but ...

[override11]

thats all fine and good, but who wants to have a nice sleek looking PC in their living room, and a big honkin white crappy keyboard just sitting there?

Re:Not terribly helpful, but ...

[mjpaci]

Isn't his machine 'legacy free'? That means no serial (RS-232), no PS/2. He is looking for a USB solution.

--Mike

Might not be so easy

[The Flying Guy]

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.

Too simple

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Open old KB. Cut away everything except the controller chip and the traces between it and where the cable enters.

RTFI

[KDan]

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

I had a similar problem once

[Vilim]

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

simple

[prewashedironman]

1. Plug in any old keyboard.
2. Boot computer
3. Whip out keyboard
4. Don't turn computer off

No one has mentioned yard sales?

[silicon not in the v]

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.