How to remap HID keyboard keys

hidkey-bindingkeyboardsleep

I got some "close to useless" USB sleep buttons for computers from a marketing campaign and was wondering how to use it to something cooler. Like.. Playing sad trombone when pressed.

So I went around looking how does it installs, and finally seems to be simply a HID keyboard key. Googlin' a bit more, I've found Patriot's question which seemed quite the answer – but no. The programs they describe there do not trap the commands from the USB dongle even in "teach mode" if I press it my computer goes to sleep -_-

What would be the correct way to find and remap that key to something specific?

Edit Forgot to mention the operation system. it is Windows 7

Best Answer

It looks like this Keyboard Layout tool by Microsoft lets you remap a key on an existing layout. Apparently it is a GUI that lets you edit the registry settings for your keyboard mapping. You can also trying hacking the registry keys under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Keyboard Layout

Good luck. (fade out: whaaa-whaaaarmmm)

Explanition

With the tree command I have found this

$ tree /dev/input/by-path
/dev/input/by-path/
├── pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.1:1.0-event-kbd -> ../event3
├── pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.1:1.1-event -> ../event4
├── pci-0000:00:1d.2-usb-0:1:1.0-event-mouse -> ../event2
└── pci-0000:00:1d.2-usb-0:1:1.0-mouse -> ../mouse0

Ok, so /dev/input/event3 is my keyboard.

The od command dumps files in octal and other formats.

With the -x option it dumps hexadecimal.
And with the --width=144 option it dumps only one line per keypress (one line is 144 Bytes long).
Option --read-bytes=144 quits od after 144 Bytes.

The awk command prints the 12th field out of the whole line. That only, if the number of fields NF is greater then 1, because every second line is just a line break.

The while true loop around the whole thing is because if I type some letter keys it breaks. I get no more results, only 0000. But the od command quits reading after 144 Bytes (one key press). After that it is restarted. There is surely a better fix for that, but this is a good workaround.

Example output (I pressed a few times Return, RightCtrl and Backspace, which gives me the correct numbers when comparing to this document from microsoft (PDF) or this text file document)

Best Answer

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