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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

Can you use the keyboard.... as a keyboard for other computers?

Yes, I think Gordon Hollingsworth from Raspberry Pi has posted somewhere specifically how to do it (maybe in the comments on the post on the Pi website?).

Found it! Merci :)

>It would be possible to do this, but you’d have to run a simple buildroot SD card which runs a suitable dwc2 OTG HID driver to pretend it is a keyboard…

Otherwise, you can use the Pi 400 as a Barrier server to the other computer… See my other blog post for details!

Gordon

Here's an interesting idea:

A build of KeePass that uses the OTG mode for autotype. You plug the Pi 400 into a USB port on your device (whether computer, console, or whatever) and the password file is never on the computer in the first place.

Edit to add:

Might work better with a tablet build of the Pi, though, and you'd probably still want it to sync the file to Dropbox or some other storage place for safety.

Hold on, so you could plug it in to autotype a password?

That's precisely the idea, yeah. It's entirely possible with the hardware, the software (e.g. KeePass) would need to be modified to send through the gadget mode USB device.

Nice, it's probably using the USB gadget functionality. That probably means you could modify the image to access a bunch of the ports. Having the ability to turn my Pi Debugging Keyboard into a USB Ethernet adapter would have some advantages.

Yeah lots of interesting possibilities to think about!

You should probably be able to use Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy)

One of my main uses for random keyboards is hooking them onto a raspberry pi that needs some local debugging...

With a little bit of code, you should be able to pipe keyboard input to one of the USB ports.

There's a project that did that but for a different purpose - a network KVM using a Pi4 - https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot/

It had to use the one USB-C connector that's used for power for emulating the keyboard and mouse since that's the only one that supported USB-OTG. So you kind of either need PoE or another adapter to both power the device and be able to hae the Pi act as an input device.

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