OTG adapter · connect USB Keyboard or Mouse to your SmartPhone

manero666 (53)in #android • 7 years ago

Originally posted on my Blog:
manerosss.wordpress.com

Hi!

I love using my SmartPhone thanks to many great FOSS applications to test and try out and because it consume 20 times less than my Desktop PC.
One of these is Termux which is basically a mini GNU/Linux distributions with tons of packages to install.

But the biggest downside is to write with the touch keyboard.. Open-source software like AnySoftKeyboard are great to fully customize the touch keyboard but it’s still far from being close to the experience of typing with a PC-keyboard.

Therefore I was looking on Ebay for a male-mini-USB to female-usb adapter (aka OTG adapter) to connect a USB keyboard.

Disclaimer: I know about the existence of wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse that don’t need any adapter and cables management, but I opted for the OTG adapter because:

I like to buy used stuff at a cheap price, USB keyboards can be found for super-cheap or even for free. Bluetooth KBs are way more expensive and there’s less variety.
No batteries to deal with, A USB KB is always ready to be used.
I’ll use this configuration on a bus when going at work, this means that the KB will be seated on my legs thus close to my nuts.. the less invisible waves exchange are going on close to that area of my body the better it is!
Thanks to the adapter I can connect USB-keys, external HDD, MIDI Keyboards and controllers, Gamepads and much much more to experiment with.
I’m old-school and a total alternative-holic, this means that I always do the opposite of what the mass does.

Alright, on Ebay I found this nice adapter straight from Hong-Kong:

The bid started at 1$ with free-shipping, I was the only one bidding so I got the adapter for that price.
Normally I don’t like to buy new mega-cheap stuff from China because to maintain such low prices there’s sure someone who’s treated like a slave.
Anyway this was the best looking one and the other offers from Europe where basically crappier Chinese adapters but way more expensive.

I got it in about a week and I immediately tried it out with a keyboard.

The adapter runs without problems out of the box with my Meizu M2note, it even recognize the Keyboard manufacturer.

The only problem I have is by witching the USB KB layout, I’m using a German KB but it get recognized as USA layout and it looks like I’m not able to change it (I have to say that in the past I randomly deleted some Android core package ehehehe).
But I’m going to fix that soon!

So that’s about it for now. Soon I’m going to try a few more configurations, like using a USB controller and send the inputs wirelessly to the PC.