My wired and wireless keyboard setup

Almost 22 years back, I joined the computer course not just to learn computers but the curiosity and interest to tap and type the keys on the keyboard. From then on I feel a joy when I type something. In fact I feel more natural to type And save my thoughts than writing on paper.

Apple wired keyboard to wireless

I have been using Apple wired keyboard, Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard in the past. Those are the best devices to work on the Macos platform. Couple of times, the wired keyboard fell down and still worked well. When I tried to clean this keyboard upside down, some of the keys failed to work and made that wired keyboard no more usable as some important keys arrow,tab failed to work.

But still I don’t want to throw this. I thought of using this for tablets as these failed keys may not have much impact of touch tablets. I was looking for a solution to convert this wired keyboard to wireles. I ended up with using my raspberry PI With bthhub to configure and Setup.

With this setup I can use the keyboard on multiple devices by simply toggling the host using the web interface.

Bluetooth Mini Keyboard

The same thing happened on my Bluetooth keyboard which also failed to work in some keys. This time changing battery again and again seems to be annoying. Sometime you may not know whether the issue is with the keyboard or the battery. More time is spent with this keyboard just to figure out what’ strong why the keys are not responding. That’s the time I decided to throw out of the batteries and convert this wireless keyboard to a wired keyboard just for powering up and it still uses the Bluetooth to connect to the target devices.

How easy is to power these Bluetooth devices with the wires. I used a old sub cable and unfortunately none of the power bank supplied the power as all these power banks uses. Circuitry to determines whether the target devices is charging. In my case, it’s just 2 terminal wires to power the Bluetooth circuit. Then I realised I can simple power this by using the android phone with a mini sub dongle and it used just 2% power for typing for 1.5 hours (this post is written using this).

I am happy with this setup and I don’t need any separate charger to power up this Bluetooth keyboard mostly used for typing in the morning on my iPad or in the travel.