Would HW (dummy) DDC/CI client work?

Community DIY Corner
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Story time (you may skip)

Hello there. About year and some ago I’ve equipped my home office corner and some time after that I also decided to build my first gaming pc. That means I’ve ended up with two computers on one desk. My company’s laptop and my gaming desktop. After briefly researching available KVM switches, I’ve decided none really suits my needs completely. Main reason for that is I also use my display (ThinkVision P27h) instead of usb-c docking station for my work laptop. Having only one cable attached to laptop is addictive. So introducing KVM switch into my setup would also mean buying new docking station in addition to pretty expensive KVM switch. So I just bought cheap USB2 switch with hub for keyboard and mouse and ended up relying on display internal input switching for video (and audio). But those little buttons on display are so non-ergonomic. In that time I’ve learned about DDC/CI (ddcutil, ddccontrol, …) and thought…

Can I build HW box to put on my desk and use it to control my display?

I was thinking that if my display has multiple video inputs and not all of them are populated, I may as well use one of them for my DIY box. The box would need to implement DDC/CI interface so display can accept it’s commands. This way I could design more ergonomic controller for switching display inputs. Or even more. I could add knob for setting display brightness. Or even add optic sensor and implement adaptive brightness. What do you think? Any pointers how to approach this?

If there are any mistakes in my assumptions or any other problems, please point them out to me. I am basically not experienced with designing HW. I only got to play with arduino and some other MCU a little. I also don’t have much time for my hobby projects so they usually take a long time.

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Hey and welcome!

Have you tested that the programs you mentioned (ddcutil, ddccontrol, …) work on your monitor? (you can access these with WSL from win10)
Could you just use your computer(s) to switch the monitor input? I had a script to switch inputs when closing a vm… Worked great, no need to finagle with the little tiny buttons on the monitor :slight_smile:

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Yes, I’ve tried them. That’s actually how I got to know I can also change brightness and other settings on my display. I use linux on my work laptop and I know there is tool for windows with similar capability too. So setting up scripts on both computers to handle changing inputs should not really be a problem. But somehow the idea of having physical interface which works independently on any computer seems more appealing to me. And adaptive brightness also sounds cool.