It’s likely many of us have been in the position of first set-up on a machine such as a Raspberry Pi, and had keyboard problems. Either no spare keyboard is to be found, or a cluttered desk has to find extra space for a full-size keyboard. [Henk] has a handy solution, use the existing keyboard on your laptop.

His approach is both ingenious and simple, as it’s only the K part of a KVM. On the laptop end, it’s a serial terminal, without the receiving side. The serial port in question is an RP2040 board which implements a USB-to-serial port. This serial connection goes to another RP2040, which does the ingenious bit. It’s a serial-to-USB HID keyboard. All of this means that keystrokes on the laptop are sent down the serial connection, and appear on the Pi or whatever computer as a USB keyboard as though typed locally. The mildly annoying first set-up can be done, and then it can be run via SSH or whatever other remote access protocol as normal. The code is provided, so anyone with a couple of RP2040 boards can do it.

We like this hack, because we’ve had the annoyance of needing a keyboard to set up what would otherwise be a completely headless machine too many times. It’s one to store away at the back of your mind, for those rare improvisational need-an-extra-keyboard moments.