In 2022 I patched the Raspberry Pi kernel so TinyPilot could wake my sleeping PC over USB. Since then, the setup changed. I wanted to upgrade my Raspberry Pi to a Pi 5 (16 GB of RAM!), but TinyPilot didn’t support it. So I replaced TinyPilot with a JetKVM, a dedicated KVM-over-IP device that doesn’t need a Raspberry Pi. The Pi 5 now runs other things.

JetKVM already had a Wake-on-LAN button, and I set up nginx in front of it for remote access and automated WoL¹. But when I bought it, it couldn’t wake my PC over USB, the same way a real keyboard would. Other people had reported the same problem in jetkvm/kvm#120. Since I’d already dealt with this on the Pi, I figured I should try porting the fix.

I rely on TinyPilot to manage a Windows PC that lives in a closet. TinyPilot is a Raspberry Pi-based KVM: it streams HDMI video from the PC and pretends to be a USB keyboard and mouse so I can type over the network. My PC also sleeps aggressively to save power. A real keyboard wakes it. TinyPilot did not, so every remote session began with a trip to the closet. Wake-on-LAN was unreliable on that motherboard, so I decided to make TinyPilot behave like a normal USB keyboard during suspend.