Hacking Keyboard for DS

[mayhem366]

I was just wondering how cool it would be to have an external keyboard for the DS for all the homebrew text editors and such out there as an on screen keyboard is a little small to type on with much speed.

Would it actually be possible?

Maybe pull apart some other piece of hardware (the guitar hero grip springs to mind) and wire it to extra buttons?

This would be perfect for taking notes in lectures

 

[xDlmaoxD]

It's possible.
If it was done on the PSP it can be done on the DSi.
You just need to know what you are doing when coding it.
I doubt a official keyboard would ever come out for the DSi.

 

[mayhem366]

How difficult would it be to interface a serial device like this?

I am assuming that the Slot-2 port has a TX and RX line or something similar so data will only flow down one line?

Is it even possible to read raw data from this port? Must be i guess.

 

[Vague Rant]

A guy built a keyboard for the GBA a while back: link.

 

[mayhem366]

Wow, that keyboard would be perfect, too bad i know nothing about the DS's hardware. Might be worth a google.

 

[DanTheManMS]

The problem is that the keyboard there used the GBA's serial link port, which does not exist on the DS. Thus, I'm not entirely sure where you'd send the keyboard output data where the DS could receive it and work with it.

 

[mayhem366]

My guess would be the slot 2 port as that is designed for external hardware to be implemented.

It may be worth the effort if i dig around the internet and find some stuff out.

Trouble is i have no experience at the programming side for the NDS, too bad there is no java library

 

[DanTheManMS]

Actually there is a way to run Java code on the DS, called Java4NDS, but it's not nearly as complete as DevKitPro and libnds.

 

[sprogurt]

Homebrew would have to be especially written to use this but it never stopped the guitar grip and the motion sensor card (anyone still remember that? XD) But then again the guitar grip was probably assigned the values for the d-pad.

 

[xxRAG3]

I was just wondering how cool it would be to have an external keyboard for the DS for all the homebrew text editors and such out there as an on screen keyboard is a little small to type on with much speed.

Would it actually be possible?

Maybe pull apart some other piece of hardware (the guitar hero grip springs to mind) and wire it to extra buttons?

This would be perfect for taking notes in lectures

Uhh, i guess possible if you used the SLOT 2 of the DSlite, there are not other spots for an addon.

 

[Vague Rant]

Homebrew would have to be especially written to use this but it never stopped the guitar grip and the motion sensor card (anyone still remember that? XD) But then again the guitar grip was probably assigned the values for the d-pad.

No, if this was true you could play Guitar Hero with the d-pad. They're separate keypresses, as demonstrated by DS2Key, which supports all the DS's buttons and the d-pad plus the Guitar Hero grip's buttons.

 

[mayhem366]

Homebrew would have to be especially written to use this but it never stopped the guitar grip and the motion sensor card (anyone still remember that? XD) But then again the guitar grip was probably assigned the values for the d-pad.

No, if this was true you could play Guitar Hero with the d-pad. They're separate keypresses, as demonstrated by DS2Key, which supports all the DS's buttons and the d-pad plus the Guitar Hero grip's buttons.

A most excellent point, i was going to make the first one too.

As for java4nds, is that similar in anyway to the java KVM that was ported over for the DS, tried to use that a while back but couldn't really get it to work.
Is there a similar thing for the wii?

Edit: Looking on google it is the java KVM ported over.