xkbd-bthid : a software Bluetooth HID Keyboard
What is it?
xkbd-bthid is a Bluetooth HID Keyboard in software, meaning this is an application
which emulates a Bluetooth Keyboard. I call it soft-HID.
What could you use it for? You can turn any Linux box, PDA or tablet into Bluetooth
keyboard and control your DVR, MP3 player or what ever with it.
xkbd-bthid running on the Nokia770
Features
- Emulates a Bluetooth Keyboard
- Follows HID standard
- Supports ONLY Boot mode (this means no support for MacOSX, yet!)
- Customizable (create your own keyboard layout)
News
Details
It started out as a way to use my laptop's keyboard as a keyboard for my Nokia770, I
know using ssh would be much easier but I wanted it this way. Also I wanted to play with HID and at this
time I didn't own any HID hardware. Later I figured out that I actually want to use my
Nokia770 as a Bluetooth keyboard to control my laptop and other things.
Since I want an on-screen-keyboard I just took Matthew Allum's xkbd (se below) and ripped out the XTest
stuff and replaced it with an interface to my HID daemon (which is automatically spawned). I chose xkbd
because its small, only used Xlib and provides a super simple way to create custom keyboard layouts.
Usage
Using and installing it is not quite trivial. First you need the absolutely latest BlueZ librarys and utils (min. v2.24), since some features where added to BlueZ for
making this happen. The Nokia770/maemo package comes with a static linked version
so you don't need to do anything here.
To run xkbdbthid, on your Linux box - the maemo package contains a wrapper, you need to do the following:
hciconfig hciX class 0x002540 (as root)
cd xkbdbthid-0.1/bthid
xkbdbthid -k en_US.qwerty.xkbd
Customizing the keyboard layout
The keyboard layout is specified in the .xkbd file. It's pretty self explanatory. The difference to
the regular xkbd format is the scancode tag for each key. It defines the scancode to be sent
for this key. The scancodes are specified in /usr/include/linux/input.h.
Download
Feedback
Please provide feedback to: collin-xkbdbthid(AT)betaversion.net
Especially welcome are new and cool keyboard layouts!
Do you like my software and the fact that it is free? Consider a donation, thank you!
updated:
Sun Jan 28 22:19:23 CET 2007
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