Dell Premier Collaboration Keyboard - KB900. Looking for community interest to hack the zoom and teams touch controls

[nomisma-qt]

So i got this keyboard, and it's just awesome, build quality and key feel is over the top. Automatic backlight is almost perfect after firmware upgrade. I would pay $250 for this without even blinking, and it sells for much less than that.

I have a thing for high end keyboards, and this takes the spot even over the legendary Logitech DiNovo Edge. I highly recommend it.

So it has these touch controls that only activate when using Microsoft Teams or Zoom, and you must have the Dell Peripheral Manager installed. There is no way to activate them in Linux.

Please check youtube videos to see them in action

I have a Windows 11 VM in proxmox, which i have used to access the keyboard with Dell Peripheral Manager, and upgrade both the keyboard firmware, and the receiver firmware.

So, is there anyone with skills that would like to help hacking the touch controls? i presume some kind of setup to listen to the USB traffic when firing up Teams or Zoom in windows or something, and then use that to create a linux hack, or maybe even input-remapper support?

Thanks.

[michaelknap]

I know its a bit late but maybe others will find it useful.

I ended up doing almost exactly this for a different Dell mouse/keyboard setup.

I passed the Dell receiver through to a Windows VM running under KVM, ran Dell Peripheral Manager there, and used tshark with usbmon to capture the USB traffic while performing pairing, unpairing, and related receiver-management operations. From those captures I was able to work out the relevant protocol well enough to implement the operations natively on Linux.

I don't have access to a KB900, unfortunately, so I can't test the Teams/Zoom touch controls specifically, but I see no reason why the same approach couldn't be used here: capture the USB traffic while Dell Peripheral Manager enables/disables or otherwise interacts with those controls, then compare the transactions and work backwards from there.

My project and notes/code are here if they're useful as a reference:

https://github.com/michaelknap/dell-rf