Prior Art/Related Projects

Other projects / Similar work / Inspiration

  • The original RelayKeys from Harold Pimental.

  • bbx10 on the adafruit forums. bbx10 developed the Ascii to HID translation function. A massive thanks - the code is currently mostly his. He also worked out some of the early problems on speed issues we were having. You can read the full thread here.

  • HID-Relay from juancgarcia. Not really spent much time looking at this - but looks neat. Converts hardware keyboards to Bluetooth.

  • 232Key - Converts Serial devices to Keyboard. Kind of the other way round to what we want.

  • BL_keyboard_RPI. Turns a Pi into keyboard emulator

  • ESP32_mouse_keyboard. Uses a ESP32 as a mouse/keyboard over serial. Very similar idea. (See issue 39for details about this in relation to using VNC (TY @RoganDawes)

AAC projects

  • MacroServerMac was an attempt to create a Mac Port of "MacroServer" developed by JabblaSoft for MindExpress . This is a protocol for communication over a TCP/IP stack. Its pretty nice - but if you are in a school or business allowing others machines to access the network in this way is often restricted. It can also be pretty flaky

  • Liberator / PRC - have the neatest commercial solution out there for AAC. You can either plug in a USB cable - or use a bluetooth dongle to connect with another computer. Its awesome - but sadly only available to you if use one of their devices.

  • Dynavox used to make the AccessIT. A similar idea but using infrared rather than radio/bluetooth. It was pretty expensive but a lot of people loved its simplicity. More recently they have brought this back to life with AccessIT 3. Note it only works in Snap software - and not for any device. Just another windows device. You also need a USB port on the device you connect to.

  • The AAC world has been trying to create standards for this for years.. and some have succeeded. Check out AACKeys and the "GIDEI" protocol - which now feels a little outdated but a great attempt at standardising communication between AAC devices and other systems over serial.

Non-disability related products

  • the Buffalo BSHSBT04BK was pretty neat. You can still get this in Japan and does a very similar job

  • The IOGEAR KeyShair (now discontinued) looked like exactly the same dongle - but with different software.

Both of these products though failed to respond to software (on-screen) keyboards reliably.

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