Keyboard / Mouse Input Device Design??

I need to know how difficult it would be to design and build a device that is able to force hardware keystrokes and mouse operations into an Intel based motherboard. I was thinking that it could have one end plugged in to a serial port or USB, and the other end would be a Y connection to the keyboard and mouse ports. How difficult and costly would building such a device be?

Reply to
Peter Olcott
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A keyboard wedge ? Similar to the smaller and cheaper barcode readers ?

Reply to
Dave Kearton

It's a trivial exercise at the PS/2 port level. PS/2 keyboards are really dumb. USB is a lot more of a challenge.

Reply to
krw

So the Mouse PS/2 port would be easy, too? The device could use a regular serial port instead of a USB, would this make it easier?

Reply to
Peter Olcott

Build it?

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Reply to
Homer J Simpson

It must be able to create keystrokes AND every mouse action.

Reply to
Peter Olcott

This must have been a personal project.

Was there a special reason to do it this way ??

As a learning project sure, but WHY ??

Reply to
Donald

A friend of mine threw together a custom "keyboard" with rotary encoders and a bunch of keys (a custom control console for the entertainment business) and got it to talk to a PC fairly readily. He used a PIC 18F USB microcontroller and some demo code Microchip has available. It took him longer than a more sane person because he insisted on translating their C to assembler.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

See for yourself:

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What are you intending to accomplish?

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

I don't know about the mouse but I feed keystrokes into a PC with an old keyboard card and reed relays across the matrix inputs.

Reply to
gfretwell

Conceptually, how?

Reply to
Homer J Simpson

I suppose if you started with a ball mouse card and tricked up the pulses that normally come from the wheel photo cells you could make the cursor move around but I doubt you could actually hit the right spot in any repeatable manner. The buttons are just switches so they are easy. I found it was a lot easier to just use an application that could be operated by keystrokes.

Reply to
gfretwell

"Peter Olcott" schreef in bericht news:_Fy1h.69468$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe19.lga...

A mouse is a serial thing. Guess the old COM-port mice still work under WINXP. If I remember well, the Microsoft mouse requires three bytes

9600,n,7,1. The keyboard generates scan codes in a serial way. FAIK also 7 bits but a with dedicated protocol which has its own, separate clock. Maybe you can simulate it by fiddling with some parallel printer port pins but I never tried this out.

To build such a module, I'd use a micro with two UARTS. One to receive the data from the controlling computer and one to send data to the mouse interface. Three I/O pins of the micro can handle the keyboard interface. As the micro has to distinguish between data for the mouse- and data for the keyboard input you can set bit 7 for one of them.

As I see it, it's quite some work but not difficult. The program for the micro will be small. Hardly any calculation required. If you have more time then money, you can take a smaller, cheaper micro with only one UART and do the other in software.

petrus bitbyter

Reply to
petrus bitbyter

On a sunny day (Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:37:41 -0600) it happened "Peter Olcott" wrote in :

Hi, I forgot to tell you in comp.os.linux.development.apps that the part where you read the screen is also problematic, as X has its own graphics drivers, etc. So you may as well add a web cam looking at the screen and associated analysing hardware too,. I think the Japanese are way ahead with robots :-)

Sorry s.e.d guys little inside joke, we met in c.o.l.d.a before...

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

I need to do the MOUSE and the KEYBOARD. I have patented technology that can intelligently recognize anything on any GUI screen. There are some applications that get their keyboard input directly from the hardware. There might be some applications that do the same thing for the mouse. I want a single solution that always works on the Intel platform that can be used for automated testing on any OS.

Reply to
Peter Olcott

I need a way to feed keystrokes to applications that get their keystrokes directly form the hardware. I want the same sort of solution for the mouse.

Reply to
Peter Olcott

I am building a universal GUI testing system based on

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technology that can always intelligently "see" anything on the screen by recognizing graphical objects from their pixels.

Reply to
Peter Olcott

These would be mass produced. It looks like you have the right basic concept. How many hours would it take to build a prototype?

Reply to
Peter Olcott

Are you saying that doing a screen capture is hard, or recognizing the graphical objects from the screen capture? (I got the last part solved).

Reply to
Peter Olcott

What do you mean by *force* ?

You can get USB keyboards and mice anyway !

A USB mouse saved the day a while back on a system I was working on when for some unknown reason the standard mouse 'froze'. We just substituted a USB mouse and it was fine again.

Graham

Reply to
Eeyore

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