Re: The Input Layer and the Serial Port

[Richard Purdie <rpurdie@rpsys.net>]

On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 13:54 -0600, Loye Young wrote:
> I, a humble pilgrim in the Land of Tux, have spent over a year seeking
> a simple answer to what seems to me a simple question: How do I expose
> my RS232 barcode scanner to the input layer so that the scanned
> information shows up in applications? Basically, I need the scanner to
> act like another keyboard. Scan a code, see the numbers. 

I can give you some hints but it will involve writing a program. It can
all be done in userspace though, saving any pain of messing with the
kernel internally/kernel recompiling.

The kernel has a driver called uinput which lets you inject input events
into the kernel from a userspace piece of code. You can write a program
to read data from /dev/ttyS0 (at 9600bps) and pass it to this uinput
driver. That should then do exactly what you need.

Working out for to use uinput caused me a few headaches but I can point
you at some example code:

http://svn.o-hand.com/view/misc/trunk/zaurusd/apps/tskeys/tskeys.c?rev=59&view=markup

This code adds support for offscreen soft "buttons" on a touchscreen. It
passes the key events to the kernel via uinput.

Cheers,

Richard