USB HID Keyboard input into Node-Red flow

[Ian M]

I'd like to be able to monitor a local USB HID device and use it's output as an input into a Node-Red flow.  Does anyone have any thoughts how I might approach this?

I'm trying to use a DSAN Perfect Que to trigger the GPIO's of a Raspberry Pi.  The Perfect Que attaches to the host through USB and presents itself as a USB keyboard.  I would like to feed the key presses from the HID into my flow but I don't know if there is a way to gather that input into Node-Red. 

Thanks,

Ian

[Endre Szabo]

Some tips: evdev, /dev/input :)

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[Dave C-J]

Or you may look to modify our makeymakey node - https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-red-node-makeymakey - which is specifically looking for that hardware - but does pretend to be a keyboard...

It sits on top of this npm - https://www.npmjs.com/package/hidstream

[ryan...@gmail.com]

Can confirm that node-hid (the underlying package used by hidstream) is painless to wrap and use in Node-Red - I've used it to identify HID devices and capture their input (keyboards, joysticks, wheels/pedals, 3D navigators etc.). Might take a bit of trial & error to figure out their data formats but shouldn't be too hard if you can trigger repeatable inputs.

Ryan.