Serial KVM stick
minihpc
At our Carpentries Offline hackathon at RSECon’22, we found that working with Raspberry Pis can be difficult if there are limited screens and keyboards to plug into them. However, everyone always brings a laptop to a hackathon.
The Serial KVM stick allows controlling a Raspberry Pi or other single board computer (SBC) with just a laptop: no external screen and keyboard required.
It’s already possible to use a Raspberry Pi via SSH or serial connection. However, this isn’t true of all SBCs, and has a few problems:
- A network connection is required to use SSH, which isn’t always possible if the device can’t be connected to a network (e.g. the only available network is Eduroam) or doesn’t already have network credentials stored on it
- Serial connections are possible but must be enabled in the
/boot/config.txtfile. - It’s not possible to use a GUI over either of these methods
This solution uses a USB video capture card and a CH9329-based Serial -> USB HID Keyboard emulator.
- This emulates a keyboard and mouse on the guest computer
- Using software, the guest machine can be controlled directly within a window on the latop.
For more information see the serial-kvm repository on github.
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