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1 keyboard, 2 machines?

Zzyzxx

Junior Member
Anyone know how to accomplish this via either hardware or software? I'm not talking about using a KVM - I need SYNCHRONIOUS keyboard input to 2 machines. I press 1 key on the keyboard, it goes to BOTH (or 3,4,5, etc) machines.

Odd yes, but there is a purpose for this.

Anyone?
 
I would say look for a keyboard that has both PS2 and USB inputs. My Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro has one wire that runs all the way down to the end, and when it gets to the end, it splits in two and you have a plug for either. i would assume I could hook them into two different computers and type on both at the same time. I never tried it that way, but I did have it hooked up to two computers at one time, it's just that they were never both on at the same time.
 
You might need to use custom software, where machine 1 forwards keys over the network to listener programs running on machines 2,3,... that then "stuff" the windows keyboard buffer.
 
Anyone know of any programmers familiar with this genre or any forums I may look towards for advice? I've done a little VB before, but this task looks a little daunting.
 
It is possible that you might be able to do it in hardware. http://www.computer-engineering.org/ has some assembly code that allows PICs to emulate PS/2 keyboards, as well as descriptions of the protocols and the functions of the 8048 and 8042. With that, and some skill, toil, and luck, you could probably hack together a quite clever system allowing you to clone one keyboard onto an arbitrary number of systems.

If you don't fancy trying that(can't say that I blame you), you might be lucky enough to have it work with something simpler. It could be as easy as building an adapter that connects the keyboard to both systems(though I'd cut the +5 in one of the connections, and tie the systems' grounds together). As keyboards speak a bidirectional serial protocol, they might be horribly, horribly confused by this, so it might not work at all. It could also be that, for impedance reasons or similar, it doesn't work, in which case something of intermediate complexity, involving optocouplers or similar, might help.

I'm sorry to report that I could find no off the shelf hardware device for this purpose. On the software side, I've never heard of such a thing for Windows(which I would guess you are using, if you are a VB fellow. If you are using a *NIX, though, it should be reasonably(for some value of reasonably) simple. You would need to set up an app on one machine that takes the output of the keyboard device and writes it to the keyboard devices of all the other machines, over the network. This could be an obnoxious bit of scripting and permissions twiddling, depending on the details; but the device structure of *NIX should make it quite simple in principle. That probably doesn't help you, though. Good luck.
 
You could try the Software fourm here, message boards at CodeProject.com, and that job bids site that I can't recall the name of.

It's just a bit of client / server networking code plus a keyboard hook on the main PC and keyboard stuffer on the satellites. 2 tiny C++ programs, I'd guess under 10 hours of coding, cost anywhere from $200 - $1,500 depending on the hourly rate.

Obviously finding something already built would be cheaper, but that's always the case.
 
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