FYI, I'm an Arduino/microcontroller noob! No experience yet but have been doing a lot of research to get started!
I have a use-case where I need to connect a USB card reader (operating in keyboard emulation mode) to a printer. A card swipe on the reader allows users to "login" into the printer. If I need to troubleshoot the printer, I can remotely connect to the panel and diagnose issues. However, the problem is that I can't remotely emulate the card swipe to test out that "login" functionality. (FYI, these are Ricoh printers & MFDs)
So basically I'm looking for hardware that offers dual USB* + Wifi and has the following functionality:
- incoming USB to read the USB card reader data (card reader in keyboard mode)
- outgoing USB to pass the card reader data thru to the printer
- (The printer sees this device as a keyboard; is that called HOST/OTG mode?)
- wifi capability (prefer client mode--not AP mode)
- establish a wifi connection to the device (like telnetd/sshd) and "passthru" keystrokes to emulate a card swipe!
*I'd prefer some hardware with USB having dedicated UARTs to do everything event-driven instead of loop logic... even if I have to build the code myself. (I hope that makes since)
If anyone is aware of existing projects/source that can do this, please let me know. These are the only "products" I've found so far that offer something similar or close:
Thanks for any tips/advice/pointers!
Mac