Perhaps we’ve all found ourselves at one time or another with more computers in use than keyboards and other peripherals at hand to use them with. With a single user you can make do with remote terminals or by simply plugging and unplugging, but with multiple users it’s not so easy.
CNX Software’s [Jean-Luc Aufranc] had just such a problem involving broken keyboards and a forgotten wireless dongle, but fortunately he had just reviewed the latest version of the Raspberry Pi 500 all-in-one computer with the fancy mechanical switches. His keyboard solution is inspired but completely overkill: to use the full power of the compact Linux machine to emulate a Bluetooth keyboard.
At the heart of this hack is btferret, a Bluetooth library. Run the appropriate software on your Pi, and straight away you’ll have a Bluetooth keyboard. It seems there’s a bit of keymap tomfoolery to be had, and hitting the escape key terminates the program — we would be caught by that SO many times! — but it’s one of those simple hacks it pays to know about in case like him you need to get out of a hole and happen to have one of the range of Pi all-in-one machines to hand.
So is this component abuse?
Why would it be? It is just a keyboard attached to an SBC that is sending the commands over Bluetooth, nothing is getting abused there. Overkill yes but abuse no.
It’s using something (an entire computer) as something else (just a keyboard).
A similar abuse was using something (a relay) as something else (just a [pickup] coil).
It’s all in your perception of what “something” and “something else” is.
People should largely be against Raspberry Pi by now. They completely sold out to corporations and threw out the hacker community that their success was built on. They have lost their way of $35 SBC for everyone to use in their projects. They are now mid-tier SBCs sold for $150 by a soulless corporation. That is in the same price category as full mini PCs with way more consumer functionality or high-tier SBCs with way more hacker functionality.
Speak for yourself, I can get a 4GB Pi 5 for $60, and no other SBC has more accessories or better support. You’d have to be crazy to not love the Pi.
Yepp, 65€ in GER for a pi5 4gb. That 150$ price point sounds like a chip-shortage scalper price tag still stuck in his mind…
Or they are taking the price for the 16 GB variant.
It gets a lot worse when you start factoring in things like a case and power, both things that are typically included with mini PCs.
Plus those mini PCs will have better support because they are running standard x86 processors.
You also ignored how the foundation seems to have stopped caring about its roots and has become more corporate.
Not me. I like there products. Not that expensive either. From the 500+, 500, 400, 5, 4, 3, to the Pico and Pico 2, there a board for almost every use or a hat if not there. … or just take a chip say the rp2350 and make your own, Like Adafruit did with their Fruit Jam, Feather, and Metro boards.
This vapid argument is so tiresome.
They have a product lineup that spans a wide range of prices. Inexpensive models are still available. Compare the Pi Zero 2W at $15 to the original $35 Raspberry Pi. Or the Pi 4B at $35 – nearly 14 years later. The inflation-adjusted cost (for both/all) is of course much less. As for a hacker purity test for the customer base, that does not interest me. If anything, hobbyists benefit from the economies of scale reached thanks to industrial customers. Their documentation and online community support is unmatched. Why do you care who else buys from them?
I don’t know about that, but Pi does deserve ridicule for crippling yet another product with micro-HDMI ports. WTF? They got a raft of much-deserved scorn for it with the 400, so they go and repeat the blunder?
Now it’s just a deliberate F-U to the community.
reinstall desktop to win11 just for screenshot? definitely!