Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

This is cool. Any chance this would scale for many machines? I have a ~15 machine lab with no KVM setup right now, and could really use something like this if it works for a large number of devices.

I'm not really into electronics, but I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to control the switch of a cheap KVM-switch with the GPIO pins of the RPi. One might even control multiple KVM-switches and daisy-chain them.

Haha, I am kind of the opposite: I work on electronics, and am not much of a sys admin. One of the problems I've run into is that I haven't found a single switch solution with enough connections. I could build a multi-level multiplexer with many switches, but that's too much effort. If TinyPilot can support multiple KVM-over-IP connections, it would be a perfect fit for me.

Thanks for reading!

I don't think there's a way to get the Pi to capture video or impersonate keyboards for more than one computer at a time.

A neat idea a friend proposed to me was to buy a "dumb" KVM that supports switching through keyboard hotkeys and use that to scale it to multiple machines. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23928251

> If TinyPilot can support multiple KVM-over-IP connections, it would be a perfect fit for me.

RPis only have 1 OTG port, though. A device that could get it to handle more machines with that single port would functionally be a KVM-switch. I don't think there's a way around that, at least not one that'd be cheaper or more practical.

Maybe a bit of an overkill, but if one would use an RPi ZeroW, you could simply stack multiple of them (together with a video-grabber) in one case, each providing KVM for one host. If you only want to use one network port, add an internal network switch to the package, have one the RPis doing the frontend to it (requires a second network port on it).

Couldn't you just connect a usb-hub?

I don't think there are usb-hubs that can work with the idea of one slave to multiple masters. Do you know of a USB hub that would work to connect one keyboard to multiple computers? That'd simply be against USB protocol. KVM switches are the devices that allow you to connect one slave to multiple masters by giving you a control of what master the slave should engage with at any one time.

Yeah, my bad, I thought of another usecase.