I managed to connect a BT keybord, Logitech Cordless MediaBoard for PlayStation 3, but there seems to be only two functional keys which are controlling the volume levels (from F7 and F8 keys).
I suppose I'm missing the geometry(?) files or like that, how can I add the missing information?

Hi everybody,
I posted on this thread several months ago to ask what, if anything, could be done to connect an SSP (non-HID) keyboard to the n900. Thanks to one helpful suggestion, I have at least managed to get my keyboard paired with the phone - but I have no idea how to get the phone to recognize the keyboard as an input device. Here's what I've got so far:

Issuing rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX creates a block device at (surprise) /dev/rfcomm0. Typing on the bluetooth keyboard while running cat /dev/rfcomm0 does indeed generate output - but this output is entirely senseless, presumably because it isn't being filtered through any kind of a keyboard profile. And hildon-im-xkbtool --list doesn't show any keyboards other than the built-in Nokia ones, which means I can't use the standard approach for applying a keyboard profile.

Anybody have any thoughts as to what I might do to get the /dev/rfcomm0 block device recognized as a keyboard device?

Many thanks,
Jordan

Yes this is my exact problem too. Even though I have painstakingly followed each piece of advice to the letter it all is for nothing since when I run the command 'hildon-im-xkbtool --list' my keyboard does not show up even though it has 'paired successfully'.

I am using the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and the latest version of Maemo and I have enabled the input profile is disabled in my bluetooth configuration.

In another post I read someone say that they had to recompile some or other kernel to get the apple keyboard to show up in the 'hildon-im'xbtool' list, but due to his 'principles' he refused to post this kernel. I do not know much about kernels myself.

I would like to thank all the clever minds working together on this thread! After starring at the almost 300 postings in despair, I worked my way through and finally got my keyboard working. It is a cheap Leasun Electronic Technology MP-0118+ I had bougth off eBay. (Added a note in http://wiki.maemo.org/Fremantle_Blue...Layout#Devices.) I shall try integrate the Python script to simplify matters a bit.

This whole affair made me feel very happy about owning a smartphone-tablet powered by Linux. Look: Nokia puts a device on the market that does not support bluetooth keyboards. The issue is labelled as "won't be supported". Under many other circumstances this would be the end of the story. -- Here it was a beginning. Thanks to the open operating system, all the information is accessible. And thanks to some clever minds it becomes usable to most everybody. This is just great. Thanks again!

Cheers!
St. Mueller, Switzerland

I've figured out how to connect non-HID (ie, SPP) bluetooth keyboards! It turns out that once you establish the initial bluetooth connection (ie, with rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX), you need to run an intermediary driver binary called kbdd, which can handle a fairly impressive range of non-HID keyboards. I wasn't immediately able to find a pre-compiled binary for Freemantle, so I went ahead and compiled my own, which you can download here. Usage is extremely staightforward, but be sure to read these instructions anyway.
Now on to applying the correct layout settings! (The keyboard may be connected, but I'm now having the same keymap-related woes that many of the rest you have reported).

Many thanks to those who helped me get this far!

EDIT: It turns out that this svelte little daemon package may also help with many of the keymap problems that people have been running into - because if you download the kbdd source, you can actually code specific keyboard layouts directly into the compiled executable. I know this because the supplied profile for my particular keyboard (a freedom model) was actually somewhat incorrect, and I discovered that the most effective and painless way to fix those errors was simply to go into the source code and move keys around. Granted, this approach only works (a) if someone has already set up a base profile for your model of keyboard, or (b) you have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the physical architecture of your keyboard, but I figured it was worth describing here nonetheless.

Anyway, the gist is that I now have a non-HID Freedom keyboard running pretty much flawlessly. Thanks again to everyone who made that possible!

good to know!

this is the list of keyboards that kbdd recognizes

a lot of keyboards!

nothing from apple there, so i still need to play with hid-apple module :P

http://www.chinavasion.com/product_i...r-smartphones/

what about this one?

By the way, those of you who are getting this error:
should be advised that this error can be a symptom that your keyboard doesn't support the HID profile, in which case using the DBus connection routines mentioned throughout this thread won't work. Thus, if you're getting this error, you might want to try the rfcomm + kbdd approach.

I am just getting my head around the directory structures of N900 - haven't even figured an easy way to edit properly from a pc yet so this is extremely painstaking.

I cannot work out for the life of me how to get KBDD loaded, nevermind running!

Extremely keen to get my IPAQ foldable working as I have just purchased it specifically for this.

Any help greatly appreciated, bluemaemo does not work unfortunately.

I've got it to the stage where the foldable shows up and can be paired successfully but nothing happens after that.
-------------------------------
tried most of the night.
The instructions here would make sense if I were actually able to get kbdd installed in the first place. Any pointers???

http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/kbdd#setup

Thanks to some help from some maemo gurus who took pity I have managed to get kbbd to execute successfully.
(you cannot execute binaries from within the MyDocs folder! also needed to chmod +x kbbd)


technosopher,


What did you do to get uinput to initialise?

From what I have read I will need a kernel build that support uinput...I have latest PR installed but apparently this is not sufficient.

I just installed support for PS3 controllers knowing that this had previously used uinput but this has simply resulted in a different error instead of uinput could not be initialized.

Currently upon executing ./kbdd -t btfoldable I receive the error:
tcgetattr: input/output error