Bluetooth virtual keyboard and Android? Any ideas?

[drossall]

I've had a bluetooth virtual keyboard for years.



I originally played with it with Palm devices. There is an Android driver, but that's for Android 2.x. It crashes repeatedly on my Android 5 and 6 devices (mainly a Nexus 7 2012 tablet) - every few seconds you get a "Stopped" report. From what I read, it doesn't need a driver if the device supports HID. So far, I have not seen any characters on screen on Android (it worked OK on Palm, of course).

I'm pretty-much at the edge of my knowledge. Any suggestions on directions to go in trying to get this working? It's partly just for fun...

Oh, and in its configuration it has a box for "address", presumably the keyboard address. That's blank. It has a Scan feature, but nothing happens. Would it be the MAC address, and how would I get that, given that the keyboard doesn't have it printed on?

[Kim]

HID Bluetooth keyboards should Just Work^[1] on modern Android - you just have to pair them.  Early Android versions didn't have HID support, so needed a 'driver' that pretended to be a soft keyboard.  If it's old enough to not be playing by the HID spec I suspect you may be out of luck.

(HID meece Just Work too, though don't actually make text selection any less painful.)


_{[1] For values of 'work' that cover text input but have some startling omissions when it comes to operating the device.  Scrolling support is patchy and there doesn't appear to be any way to open the notification window, for example.  I expect this to improve (along with landscape support) as fondleslabs with keyboard covers become more popular.}

[drossall]

Thanks, those are helpful pointers. It didn't Just Work, unfortunately, even though the support page I linked to says that it shouldn't need drivers for HID-compatible devices. The trouble is, I don't know the significance of some of the things I read. Here and here are examples of people talking about limitations of the Android HID stack. And, like me, one of those authors has tried Blueinput and/or GetBlue, although I'm not really sure whether those should help.

Never mind, I'll do a bit more experimenting, and see what happens.

[drossall]

Stunningly, I've solved this.

For the unrelated reasons in this thread, I rooted the tablet and installed Android 7. Now I've tried installing an HID terminal app, and it works!