Many of us will be used to the idea of a KVM, a device that pipes keyboard, video, and mouse over the network from a remote machine to your own. But many remote machines don’t run a GUI, so there’s not always the need for a full video experience. Enter [morpheuslord] with the PicoTTY. It’s somewhere between an old-fashioned serial terminal and a KVM.
The system has two components, a Pi Pico which plugs in to the USB port of any one of a number of machines and has a wireless card, and a Pi Zero which forms the hub. The Pico acts as both a keyboard and a serial terminal, and streams both to the user via a web interface on the Zero.
We can see the use of a machine like this, but we have a few questions. Why for instance is the keyboard needed, given that the serial terminal could provide input in itself. But however it works we can see it might have a use in cases where a terminal can’t be accessed over the network directly, and we especially like it that a single USB peripheral does the job that a conventional KVM would use a bunch of cables for.
If it’s a more conventional KVM you seek, they can now be done using a microcontroller.
There’s no proof this isn’t AI slop.
Seems so. Whoever developed it, didn’t know that RPi Zero 2w doesn’t have Ethernet port that it is supposed to communicate with the Picos over.
Also, the usability of USB serial device as a serial console is really questionable. I’m not sure that it will work reliably even with Linux kernel (definitely will not work during boot in Ubuntu as CONFIG_USB_SERIAL=m), forget about UEFI, grub, Windows Server etc. It also requires an Ethernet switch port per node, which nullifies any possible money saving on cheap pico. At this point, why not just plug an extra USB-NIC and have an out-of-band SSH network. The only feature that would be missing comparing to this project is blind keyboard input.
So, at best, it’s a developer’s playground with an imaginary goal.
Just use server hardware with proper management capabilities.
I have always associated kvm with a device that allows multiple machine to share the same user hardware … I guess over s network is valid but using rdp or even ssh usually is a bit more complex than a box with a multixontact rotary switch
“The system has two components, a Pi Pico which plugs in to the USB port of any one of a number of machines and has a wireless card”
The journalist tried to make sense of the project more than the author/LLM had done. It would make sense to have the Pico/W connecting to a Zero 2W access point (that would have a single USB-Net to speak to the outer world), but in the author’s imagination the Ethernet Pico shilds would communicate with Zero 2W over WiFi somehow.