I remember back in the day, there was a product that you’d put over your electric typewriter and it would turn it in to a printer. It was like this except that instead of making electrical connections, it actually used 40-odd solenoids to depress the individual keys!

One might trade hardware complexity for firmware and use a microcontroller instead. It could interface directly with the PS/2 port and emulate a keyboard.

hmmm, this seems really interesting, as just a few months ago I was requested to rig a game to pause after 30 seconds, then restart. I thought about a micro sitting on the ps/2 line, but I wasn’t sure how hard that would be to create a passthrough.
I ended up just soldering to the keyboard’s controller, as it only needed to press 3 buttons – esc, right, enter.
I used some small reed-relays connected to the parallel port.

Maybe if my client wants it redone, i’ll look into using a microcontroller.

Brings up the question:
Can you write a program that will type itself in and compile itself without reference to its source code files?

USE transistors dumb ass

Nice implementation. I made something similar a while back using a USB PIC. The keystrokes are programmable through USB and stored in an external EEPROM. Delays can also be added to simulate real-time typing.

http://www.azoore.net/usbkbemu.html

Cool. This reminds me of something similar, where a board with five switches rests at my feet. An arduino usb monitors and reports back to software the activities of the buttons, for doing various things – http://dmgaming.com/switchboard – it’s also nice bringing music controls outside the computer.

Windows XP has a feature called “serialkeys” which turns serial data into keystrokes, this is useful for using a microcontroller / external switches to play FPS games.