Norns and Bluetooth HIDs e.g. keyboards

Monome
#1

Hi. There are a few programs which use a (computer) keyboard for input. NISP, the Orca (@Frederickk fixed it, drink on me!) come to mind and @tyleretters might be cooking something new (so much goodness!). Anyway I don’t have a USB keyboard and don’t intend having one.

However I have a smartphone and norns is a full on GNU system. Android won’t work as a HID input device over USB noodle I don’t think, but Bluetooth keyboard apps are a reality. So for the situations where I cannot avoid having a computer keyboard, I tried to get Bluetooth going on norns and emulate a keyboard on Android. I loaded the Bluetooth kernel modules and got the systemd bluetooth service going with no issue, but bluetoothctl finds no devices. My bet is that the kernel has been compiled without it.

Has anyone had better luck with this. An alternative I can think of is emulating a keyboard from terminal, which is accessible over ssh as usual.

Update: this rather bonkers project norns.online gets key and encoder input into norns via.websockets, from the web of all places.

1 Like
#2

Or maybe I would do well to build non-keyboard input to NISP using norns encoders and good completion (wow interesting design challenge hmm all Lisp programs are :deciduous_tree: trees), or using a MIDI device as a keyboard. Actually… hmm :musical_keyboard: = :keyboard: :thinking:

Nisp
#3

@okyeron has been tinkering with Bluetooth on Norns/Fates for a while.

1 Like
#4

Unfortunately device inputs (HID, etc) in the norns code are currently limited to the USB subsystem.

1 Like
#5

But also MIDI :slight_smile: I sense a rabbit hole :hole::rabbit2::watch: haha.

#6

Note - MIDI over USB only*

  • virtual MIDI devices were recently added (and can be used with RTPMIDI), but this is particular to MIDI devices.

See the source code for more

#7

For me a :musical_keyboard: → :keyboard: mapping would be fine, since I use OP-Z as a MIDI device over USB anyway. I’ll need to see how MIDI could be mapped into NISP. Or something. So many rabbit holes everywhere.