Introduction to Keyboard Programming

As stated in the title, this is an introductory article... but the information is good and HaaTa has excellent street cred as a keyboard hacker

FYI here's the github repo for his controller firmware:

https://github.com/kiibohd/controller

TMK's firmware is also excellent if you are interested in this sort of thing:

https://github.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard

This introductory article has unfortunately little with regards to actual programming. Hopefully future articles will dig a little deeper (author mentioned a few at the end).

Does anyone know how hard it is to make a software keyboard from the USB layer in WDF? I poked around a little bit, however WDF seems very unapproachable. Of particular concern is the idea that you pretty much have to be testing within a VM in case of BSOD, which makes the whole process seem really... viscous.

Here is a nice DIY idea for a keyboard: build a keyboard that can output keystrokes sent by a smart-watch. One can then e.g. write an app that can do two-factor authentication, right from a smartwatch (without requiring the user to type any complicated codes).

Plug: my post about designing and building a keyboard from scratch (it was at the front of HN about a year ago). http://yager.io/keyboard/keyboard.html

The ergodox firmware [0] nicely illustrates the ideas in this post.

[0] https://github.com/benblazak/ergodox-firmware