OT: solution to PC systems problem??

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow Y'all.
	And thanks to the many suggestions. I've managed to find a great deal of
the information I needed.

To all that suggested those commercially available switch boxes. Thanks but
they aren't a very elegant solution in this case. There's nowhere to put
one and they aren't remote-controllable. They also generally don't deal
with multiple formats. IE: PS/2

To sum up. (In case anyone else needs to do this kinda thing)
The keyboard is relatively easy to do. An old keyboard on the end of a
cross over switch. In this case a set of relay contacts. Just the board
from the keyboard module will do. You don't actually need the keys. As long
as both it (the dummy) and the real keyboard are powered up, it's possible
to swap between them without the PC noticing. Just as long as you're not
sending data at the time you switch over. This shouldn't be too much of a
problem.

So when both machines boot, they will see a keyboard on the end of the
system and receive the necessary ACKs back from it. After that it doesn't
much matter. There may be a problem with the status LED information but in
this case it's not a problem because the master keyboard (as it were) has
no LEDs. It's an IR keyboard. (Thanks Philip) :)

The mouse is another problem all together. I'm not entirely sure if the
same approach will work. However a Serial mouse and a PS/2 mouse are
entirely different entities. What I realized I can in fact do is use a
serial mouse. I don't _have_to_ use a PS/2 Mouse. The PS/2 mouse is
virtually hooked directly across a UART. It's powered by 5 volts and not 12
as in a serial mouse. It's data signal is also 5 volts as opposed to +/-12
in a serial mouse. And of course that means it's signal is positive logic
instead of being inverted. In short, it would be a really big job to
convert the PS/2 Mouse up to Serial. Not impossible but impractical. But as
I said, I shouldn't have to.

What I still don't know is from where the serial mouse actually takes it's
power. I assume that what it does is get power from one of the signals on
the serial port. Since an RS232 port supplys no power as such. One or two
of the lines must be taken high/low and the mouse get's it's power from
that. The mouse being CMOS should draw only a small amount of current and
can get away with it. But I can't work out how this is done exactly.
Obviously time for some raw science here to find out.

Anyway, thanks for all the pointers. I appreciate it.

Be absolutely Icebox.

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