Controlling XPe from a laptop

[Michael Bate]

Our embedded device will have no mouse or keyboard in normal operation -
it will have a touchscreen.

Our field engineers will need a keyboard and mouse for their work, which
made me wonder:

Field engineers always carry a laptop, but not normally a separate
keyboard and mouse. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to
control XPe from the keyboard and mouse on the laptop (two fewer things
for engineers to carry around). Clearly special software and a special
XPe driver would be required; the laptop would be connected by a single
USB port (I suppose this would be easier to implement with two USB
connections).

Has anyone done anything like this?

Michael Bate

 

[Mike Warren]

Our embedded device will have no mouse or keyboard in normal
operation - it will have a touchscreen.

Our field engineers will need a keyboard and mouse for their work,
which made me wonder:

Field engineers always carry a laptop, but not normally a separate
keyboard and mouse. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to
control XPe from the keyboard and mouse on the laptop (two fewer
things for engineers to carry around). Clearly special software and
a special XPe driver would be required; the laptop would be connected
by a single USB port (I suppose this would be easier to implement
with two USB connections).

What about just using remote desktop or VNC via a network connection?

Connecting two computers via USB requires a special cable and USB
networking software. It would probably be easier to use a network cable.

 

[Ralph A. Schmid, dk5ras]

Field engineers always carry a laptop, but not normally a separate
keyboard and mouse. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to
control XPe from the keyboard and mouse on the laptop (two fewer things
for engineers to carry around).

We do exactly this with a preinstalled VNC server on our devices.
Works fine over a network interface, but I never did stuff like that
via USB.

 

[Richard]

Absolutely, use the built in Remote Desktop! Works here.