Is it possible to reprogram a USB keyboard

driverskeyboardusb

I recently bought a small USB device that acts as an "HID keyboard device" (standard USB keyboard)

It has only one key, which is bound to a lowercase 'b'.

I want it to be rebound to something else, and several options come to mind:

Software rebind. Easy and simple, but I don't want to configure each
machine I connect the device to.
The device comes with a Windows driver. This has two inconvenients:
No support for Linux/BSD/whatever, and the driver MAY be malware
(considering the origin of the device, it's a realistic
possibility). This driver may however allow the device to be
rebound.
Write my own driver. It has the inconvenient of also having to
deploy it everywhere, but it could be fun to do 🙂
Reprogram the device.

I'd like to avoid options 1 and 2. And I would certainly like to do 4, but I don't know if it's possible to reprogram a USB keyboard device to output different keys (it could be simple since the devices has ONLY 1 key).

CLARIFICATION: The device does work on all platforms as a standard USB keyboard does. However, the CD included has a custom driver that can be configured to translate the key to something the user selects

Best Answer

Why don't you build your own? Just take an old Keyboard you are not using, track the keys and rebuild with only the key you want to use! Somethink like this:

One-Key-Keyboard

USB-Keyboard

Or, you can go even further and use a micro controller and some switches to send the signal to whatever key you want to use and write you own driver for the micro controller. Something like that:

KEY ---> Microcontroler ---> Data Bus ---> Keyboard electronic board

edit: Re-programing wouldn't be worth it. It will take you forever for a $2 piece of electronic. Why the letter 'b'? did the manufacturer say anything about that? Can you change this letter using the Driver? The chip in the keyboard in theory is the one sending the string 'b' using RS232. What about a physical USB key-logger?

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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Rebinding Keys on a Dell Keyboard in Windows

How to get USB HID ID of pressed keyboard keys

Explanition

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