RE: BBB - HDMI and mouse

morgaine — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:40:45 GMT

With a variety of boards here all competing for desk space and HID peripherals, I solved the problem with this small but usable QWERTY QK-T288 Wireless Multimedia Keyboard W/Touchpad from CPC. At 20 quid or so it didn't break the bank, and the integrated touchpad takes up less desk space than a mouse. Also, its USB receiver is really tiny (there's a whole millimetre clearance between it and my microHDMI cable), which as noted above can be an issue with BBB.

Chicklet type keys tend not to be very typist friendly, but these do have good travel and a consistent touch, and the keyboard is "small" rather than "miniature" so fast typing is still possible. The touchpad works perfectly under X. The positioning of some keys isn't optimal (the return key in particular), but the device still provides very useful access into the BBB.

I disable gdm and just use the VTs on /dev/tty1-6 (with "journalctl -f" on one of them) as an alternative to moving my serial cable around, or as an alternative to several ssh sessions. (Angstrom doesn't provide gpm in its package feeds though, so it would have to be installed from source if you want to use the trackpad on a VT. It's available in Debian of course.)

It's a fairly developer-friendly arrangement. Worthy of note, there's a penguin on the box too and no annoying CD inside, so it's a USB class-compliant device.

Morgaine.

RE: BBB - HDMI and mouse

Former Member — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:49:45 GMT

I also found that the USB and micro HDMI connectors are a tad too close, even cables/devices with slim housings touch as seen in your photo. So a USB device with a bigger than minimal housing is going to be a problem.

Since USB hotplug doesn't currently work unless you have a hub then maybe this isn't such a big problem. But if that gets fixed then I'd think the closeness could become a problem.

Did you try and see if WebM videos in firefox fare any better than chrome ?

Oh, BTW, your green LEDS are still too bright [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-d9439475-ee3f-4512-a576-0e5a48c24e0e/contentimage_5F00_403.png:16:16]