braspkeys

Takes input file as input to braspkeys.py, reads each line, and outputs that line to pc

if no input is given, takes input from standard in and writes each line.

Check the command line help for more information on command line options. The -w flag lets you specify the wait time between each key press in milliseconds

To type special keys or "chords", use the form $<ctrl ...> where each word in the $<> is a valid key in the dictionaries in braspkeys.py. The keys will then be pressed, held, then released in order. you can escape the sequence with a "\" before the "$". If there is a bad key in the chord, the chord will be written out as it is typed without the special funcitonality

To make the script sleep, type $<sleep int> where int is the time to sleep in milliseconds

The media keys don't work.

Why I Started This Project

My PC was built with a motherboard from a dell optiplex, and I was unable to get the bios to stop throwing errors at startup. Furthermore, the wifi in my apartment is provided by my university, so I am unable to set up port forwarding.

So, I needed a solution to turn on my computer remotely without entering any commands.

I installed raspian lite onto my pi zero w then followed this tutorial to use the pi as a USB keyboard device: http://www.isticktoit.net/?p=1383

My PC bios lets me turn on the computer every morning and turn it on after blackouts, but I needed a way to get past the error screen.

I wrote this script and set it up to run twice every morning with crontab. I also set up VNC Client on the pi so I could run the script whenever I wanted.

Notes

At one point while setting up the pi as a USB keyboard, I entered one wrong character and spent 2 hours finding it. Beware of typos!

When everything was set up properly, my PC registered the pi as an unrecognized device, so don't be alarmed that the PC doesn't think it's a keyboard.

By writing the keyboard press to /dev/hidg0, you are writing to the usb keyboard input stream for the PC.

Implementation

Each key press and release consists of 8 bytes. Third byte is the key press. The first byte is the ctrl, shift, and alt keys.

For different keyboard presses, replace with the third byte with the Usage ID (Dec) number found on page 53 of the USB HID Usage tables pdf found here: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/documents/hut1_12v2.pdf

A wonderful gist with the corresponding numbers can be found here https://gist.github.com/MightyPork/6da26e382a7ad91b5496ee55fdc73db2

For the ctrl, shift, and alt keys, replace the first byte with the number in the above github link.