Share keyboard, mouse and MIDI keyboard?

Submitted by marcusg on #1

I'm roaming the internet for possible ways to connect a USB keyboard, mouse and MIDI keyboard (M-Audio KeyRig 49) to a computer about 30 kilometers away. At the computer, a student will be working, and the screen of the computer will be shared over optical fiber to my location (I'm a teacher).

Will VirtualHere enable me to connect the keyboard, mouse and MIDI keyboard from my location to the students computer, allowing me to remotely control the computer? I'll have a Raspberry PI at my location running the server software.

If it works, is it also possible to disconnect keyboard input to the Raspberry PI? Don't want to have any input to the PI when writing on the remote machine.

Also, what happens if I have to student computers trying to connect to my USB stuff at the same time? Will one connection be rejected? Will both be accepted?

Submitted by Michael on Sun, 2014/04/27 - 19:56

#2

I think you are saying you have a mouse/keyboard/midi plugged into a pi at your place and you want a student to use these from 30kms away on their windows computer?. It should work, the student just has to "use" the device from their computer and it will then appear to be directly connected. Press the keyboard or move the mouse at your place and it should move the mouse on the remote computer etc.

A device can only used by one client. if you use it remotely on the students computer it will automatically disconnected from being used locally. If two people try to use the device at once, one of them will be rejected. If you want to reuse the keyboard on the pi after it has been used remotely this is a bit tricky as you would need to rebind the driver to use locally. You would need a bit of scripting.

You can download virtualhere server and install it on your pi and try it out. Its free for one device. You can test if the devices work ok and see if it suits your needs

Submitted by marcusg on Mon, 2014/04/28 - 01:37

#3

Nice, that's perfect! I'll have a program on the student's computer (created by me) to be used in the teaching, will add a function to automatically "use" the three devices as soon as the application starts up.

I won't need the keyboard for the Pi, so it's really good that it won't be usable on the Pi even after disconnection. I'll download VirtualHere and try it out, just wanted to confirm that it should work the way I think it will.

Thanks!