Hi all,

I'm trying to concoct a "poor man's IPMI", which can provide ability to remotely see the screen, and send USB keyboard and mouse events, to an internet-connected appliance. (Operating system of appliance, and any ability to reflash it with custom firmware, outside scope of discussion. Just regard it as something with HDMI output and USB mouse/keyboard inputs).

The vision part (ie, input) is doable via an on-site Pi with HDMI to USB video capture card, and using its framebuffer to mirror the appliance's video.

The mouse/keyboard part (ie, output) is more difficult.

The basic building block would be some kind of electronic adapter which has 2 male USB plugs, one which plugs into the Pi, and registers as something like a serial port, and the other which mimics a mouse and/or keyboard. Once it's possible to send serial data from the Pi to the adapter, the adapter would translate this into mouse and/or keyboard events.

With this in place, it then becomes trivial to write a program which monitors local keyboard/mouse activity, and sends it out to the adapter which then relays these events to the appliance. Once that's happening, then the Pi can simply run up a VNC server, and then it's possible to connect to it from anywhere, see the appliance's screen, and send mouse/keyboard events from to the appliance.

Does anyone know of such an adapter that's cheap and simple, or is it time for me to pull out my soldering iron and microcontrollers again?

Disclaimer: I've been to PiKVM, but their device starts in the $hundreds. I'm looking to get something even cheaper/easier.

Cheers

aum108