piKey — A PSP Keyboard Driver

Fanjita and harleyg have released what they call "piKey". The introduction says it all…

πKey is a keyboard driver for your PSP. Its aim is to allow you to use just about any keyboard (or similar input device) as a natural method of input on your PSP.

Imagine being able to use your keyboard to control any PSP game or homebrew, and even the PSP's XMB menu and on-screen keyboard, automatically and without needing any changes to the other software. This is what πKey aims to give you.

This is an early release, demonstrating just some of the possibilities. The open, extensible framework allows πKey to be extended with new plugins, to allow support for different types of input hardware, and different input environments on the PSP.

It's reported to work best under Dark_AleX's custom firmware, and includes an installer for the easiest installation possible. Supported inputs are various infra-red keyboards and serial I/O via the PSP's headphone socket. Usability is straight forward; see the provided user guide (docs/user_guide.html) to get started.

As for the future, here is what's in store:

• New plugins for:
  • Input via Danzeff on-screen keyboard, for those who don't have any input hardware. The Danzeff keyboard is the most efficient software keyboard that I've seen.
  • Output via Psprint and Danzeff keyboards, for homebrew that uses those already.
• Proper UTF-8 support for non-US-ASCII characters.
• An additional API for detecting keypress/release events - i.e. not just a character stream, but addressing individual keystates.
• Support for loading πKey via HEN.
• Improved configurability, for instance different keymapping in the CTRL plugin.

Download: piKey v0.1

Thanks Fanjita & harleyg!

- source: pspgen.com