2 Bit Hacker

I have been unable to find a device by the following specification, but I think it would rather handy to have. I suspect it wouldn’t have a huge appeal however. The device:

A small box with a USB port on one side and VGA, USB, and PS/2 cables coming out the other side. You connect the VGA, USB, and/or PS/2 cables to one computer, and the other USB to another computer, and it gives you a window on your screen that acts as a monitor for the other computer.

I think this would be great for people who have to work on machines in datacenters and the like, where sometimes you just need a monitor and keyboard, but lugging those around are annoying. Just plug this device into the server and your laptop, and poof! your laptop acts like a monitor for the server.

I don’t think it would be terribly hard to implement. You’d need some sort of video capture chip for grabbing the VGA input. PS/2 is basically just a serial output. The USB would just emulate a keyboard and mouse (perhaps via a virtual hub) to the “remote” machine. The other USB would be somewhat trickier, I’m not sure if there’s a standard video transport over USB.

You’d probably be able to sell them to system administrators, PC technitions, and maybe people who want to run a small server at home, but don’t want to switch back and forth all the time with a traditional KVM switch. The closest competeing product I’ve seen is a one-port KVM-over-IP box, which runs $500+. I think an ideal price point for this would be in sub-$100, prolly in the $80-$100 range.

So, there’s the idea, someone go turn it into a product and sell me one…

Thoughts and Ideas hardware