thor27 / keyboard-websocket

Read evdev device and send to websocket

Keyboard Websocket

Read evdev device and send to websocket. Works only on Linux with X11.

• hardware_app.py: Read device from evdev and send key events to websocket.
• app.py: Websocket server, receive websocket message from hardware and broadcast it.
• detect_keyboard.py: Detect which keyboard to use, and saves in keyboard.cfg

Install

To run this project you need Xinput, Python, Python Evdev, flask-SocketIO and my own fork of Python socketIO-client. You need this to be running in a Linux environment with X11.

To install this project, first you need to clone it:

git clone https://github.com/thor27/multimonitor-browser.git

Then, just install requirements.txt with pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Python Evdev needs special dependencies installed on your system to build and work. Refer to their documentation for more information

On Debian, you can install xinput with:

apt install xinput

Usage

Run detect_keyboard.py as root (or evdev allowed user) once to configure.

sudo ./detect_keyboard.py

Remember, if you use virtualenv, to run sudo you will need to specify python to run the file, for example:

sudo /path/to/virtual_env/bin/python ./detect_keyboard.py

Run app.py to start the SocketIO server

./app.py

You can also run app.py as daemon with gunicorn. To do that, use the start_gunicorn.sh and stop_gunicorn.sh scripts to start and stop the SocketIO server respectively.

Run hardware_app.py as root (or evdev allowed user)

sudo ./hardware_app.py

IMPORTANT: While running hardware_app.py the controlled keyboard is disabled on X11. Make sure you don't disable the only keyboard you have. You can disable this behavior using --keep-keyboard-enabled

sudo ./hardware_app.py --keep-keyboard-enabled

Remember, if you use virtualenv, to run sudo you will need to specify python to run the file, for example:

sudo /path/to/virtual_env/bin/python ./hardware_app.py

You can test if everything is working at http://localhost:5000/

Command line Argument

All scripts used above has special command line arguments to change it's behavior. Use --help to get more information about them.

./detect_keyboard.py --help
./app.py --help
./hardware_app.py --help

Give /dev/input* keyboard permission to an user

To do that, you need to create a new rule on /etc/udev/rules.d/:

vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-user-input-reader.rules

Put this content on the file, where username is the name of the user you want to give this permission:

KERNEL=="event*", SUBSYSTEM=="input", RUN+="/usr/bin/setfacl -m u:username:r $env{DEVNAME}"

After that you can run:

sudo setfacl -m u:username:r /dev/input/eventx

To make the changes now. Remember to replace username with the correct name.

IMPORTANT Before doing that, remember that given this power to any user, you will give the user and any software executed by them, the power to sniff any input device, including reading passwords. If it's possible, create a specific user with this permission that only runs this software.

Contributors

• Thomaz de Oliveira dos Reis [e-mail]

License

• GPLv3