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Multiple keyboards with the same PC

While some people aim to reduce the size of their boards (60%, 40%, 30%, 20%!) and I can completely understand their point of view and what the benefit of small boards are, I just came across the amazing topic of separate keyboards.

Windows doesn’t make any difference between keyboards attached to the PC. You plug in two of them, but on whatever board you press “A”, it will be recognized as an “A”.

To use one keyboard as a macropad/station, you have to intercept the keycodes coming from one keyboard, process and turn them into the burst of keypresses needed to your special tasks. The program LuaMacros, which was developed for flight simulator enthusiasts, does exactly this.

Taran from Linus Tech Tips has written a script which writes the keypress to a file and fires a virtual F24 keypress: this is the quick and dirty link to AutoHotKey, and the actual macro is set up in AHK.

While LuaMacros was written to handle a bunch of keyboards and other input devices to emulate a cockpit, and Taran used the separate macroboard for video editing, the concept looks promising for other professional fields like programming.

Here is the source: https://github.com/TaranVH/2nd-keyboard https://github.com/me2d13/luamacros

And here is the introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn8ExQ2Gjg&t=0s&list=PLH1gH0v9E3ruYrNyRbHhDe6XDfw4sZdZr&index=2


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