Re: User-space Keyboard input?

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>]

Hi Mario,

> >> I'm working on BRLTTY[1], a user-space daemon which handles braille displays
> >> on UNIX platforms.  One of our display drivers recently gained the ability
> >> to receive (set 2) scancodes from a keyboard connected directly to the display.
> >> This is a very cool feature, since the display in question has
> >> a bluetooth interface, making it effectively into a complete wireless
> >> terminal (input and output through the same connection).
> >
> > tell me more about this Bluetooth device.
> 
> Its a Braille Star 40 from HandyTech.  Originally sold, the device had two
> alternative ports, serial or USB.  They recently offered an additional
> bluetooth module.  I don't really know what you want to know though :-).

what kind of profiles do this Bluetooth module support? Is it a HID
compatible device or do it uses a vendor specific protocol? Do you
tested it with Linux?

> >> However, this creates some problems.  First of all, we now have to deal
> >> with keyboard layouts.  Additionally, since we currently insert via
> >> TIOCSTI I think this might get problematic as soon as one switches
> >> to an X Windows console and modifiers come into play.
> >> 
> >> Does anyone know (and can point me into the right direction) if
> >> Linux has some mechanism to allow for user-space keyboard data to
> >> be processed by the kernel as if it were received from the system
> >> keyboard?  I.e., keyboard layout would be handled by the same
> >> mapping which is configured for the system.
> >
> > Take a look at the user level driver support (uinput).
> Yup, thats it, thanks.  Now I just need to find some example code on how
> to use it :-).

The BlueZ CVS repository utils2 contains the old bthid code that makes
use of the uinput kernel module.

Regards

Marcel