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What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates.

I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI.

https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID



USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb

As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.


Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my question!


You're welcome. I looked into it because it would make a pretty cool project and while pretty advanced, not impossible.

The cheapest analog-digital-converter chip I found is the TVP7002. Dealing with the digital pixel output is still way way too much data, but now it might be possible to scan the picture a few pixels each loop. The reasonable approach would be to process it in an FPGA or specialized chip and only deal with a compressed and scaled image in the ESP8266.




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