// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
This Tiny USB Device Turns Your Phone Into a Keyboard, Mouse, and SSH Terminal
Got a headless Raspberry Pi and want to connect to it? You don't need to use your computer for that. You can do that with your smartphone itself.
TechxArtisan's latest gadget turns your smartphone into a keyboard, mouse, gamepad and even a SSH terminal.
These folks gave us KVM-over-USB gadgets like Openterface Mini-KVM and Openterface KVM-GO in the past.
Now they are working on Openterface KeyMod, a tiny USB-bridge that can do a number of things by interacting with a computer from your phone.
Both variants have the same price tag of $24. The project is being crowdfunded on CrowdSupply.
The interesting thing here is not that the keyboard and mouse part. It's that KeyMod does two USB jobs at the same time. Let me explain.
You plug it into the target machine, and it shows up as a USB composite device: a standard HID keyboard and mouse, and a USB network bridge using the CDC-ECM standard, basically working as a private USB Ethernet link. The target gets a fixed IP at 192.168.11.2, your phone lands on 192.168.11.1. No DHCP, no Wi-Fi hunting, no driver to install on most systems.
Because HID input works without an OS loaded, KeyMod reaches BIOS screens, boot menus, and recovery environments too. It is similar to what Openterface Mini-KVM covers, just without the video feed.
On the phone side, the KeyCmd app decides what KeyMod does next. Their description mentions that KM Basic gives you a wireless keyboard, touchpad, and numpad. KM Pro adds a Shortcut Hub and Compose & Send, which lets you draft a long command, API key, or license key on your phone, review it, then fire it off as real keystrokes.
There's also Macros for scripted key sequences, a Presentation mode for Keynote and Google Slides, a Gamepad mode for emulators, and Shortcut Hub profiles for Blender, VS Code, etc.