On 3/15/2014 9:22 AM, Philip Belben wrote:
The trouble is, it would probably use bluetooth, and there is little
to beat a bluetooth keyboard for creating security holes! OTOH, phones
usually have a jack socket for speakers, handsets, etc. ISTR this has
a digital input of some sort. I wonder how easy it would be to
bitbang on that?
there is an Android interface for doing I/O via what is usually a
USB
port operating as a serial port. I don't know about the mechanism of
present a keyboard interface to Android, but a lot of replacement
products exist. I don't know if one is freely available to be had as an
example, or if you would need to figure out that yourself.
no need to bitbang, you could use an small arduino which can be had for
a few dollars and perhaps do a PS2 keyboard interface, or use a larger
arduino and interface a USB keyboard and mouse via hard wire.
I am not that concerned with my Bluetooth KB being hijacked. It is
about the size of the phone slightly smaller and has a built in laser
pointer for cat torture just for good measure. it can be had for about
half what this review puts it at now.
http://technabob.com/blog/2010/12/05/mini-bluetooth-keyboard/
I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone which works fine for accessing my
home desktop remotely. I have been working on a virtual desktop for
about 3 years so can get to the system now anywhere.
A bit off topic, but I do operate a lot of classic virtual emulations,
on my home pile, and it is pretty nice to have an emulation of a machine
maybe 10 minutes after you read about some topic here that you want to
investigate.
Unfortunately the device is too small for any classic computing other
than carrying bitsavers around (64GB sd card), though I only did that
once to prove it was possible.
thanks
Jim