Many of us will be used to the idea of a KVM, a device that pipes keyboard, video, and mouse over the network from a remote machine to your own. But many remote machines don’t run a GUI, so there’s not always the need for a full video experience. Enter [morpheuslord] with the PicoTTY. It’s somewhere between an old-fashioned serial terminal and a KVM.
The system has two components, a Pi Pico which plugs in to the USB port of any one of a number of machines and has a wireless card, and a Pi Zero which forms the hub. The Pico acts as both a keyboard and a serial terminal, and streams both to the user via a web interface on the Zero.
We can see the use of a machine like this, but we have a few questions. Why for instance is the keyboard needed, given that the serial terminal could provide input in itself. But however it works we can see it might have a use in cases where a terminal can’t be accessed over the network directly, and we especially like it that a single USB peripheral does the job that a conventional KVM would use a bunch of cables for.
If it’s a more conventional KVM you seek, they can now be done using a microcontroller.