Tao of Mac

Jun 26th 2005 · 2 min read

SonyEricsson HID Profiles

Like Theme Files, Bluetooth HID profiles on the are tar files that contain an XML file with keyboard mappings and a single image designed to fill the whole screen and illustrate them.

What You Can Do

Well, you can remotely control any Bluetooth HID-enabled computer remotely from your phone (see "Caveats" below) using the pre-supplied SonyEricsson profiles.

(if you don't have one defined or in your phone memory, check the installation CD - it will load three default remote control profiles - Desktop, Presentation and Media Player, if I'm not mistaken. The profile names should be pretty obvious.)

Up until SonyEricsson released the Bluetooth Remote Control Tool (which, incidentally, is available for both Windows and ), there was very little you could do concerning creating your own remote control profile unless you took the time to pore over a gazillion technical notes.

So I did not really know how to customize remote control files with the correct keycodes, and put together the following set of notes, which may still be useful to someone:

Dissecting a .hid File

As an example, let's look at the default "Desktop" HID profile:

$ tar -tvf Desktop.hid
-rw-rw-rw- root/root     36887 2004-04-20 20:20:02 Desktop.jpg
-rw-rw-rw- root/root      1796 2004-04-20 22:29:24 DeskTop.kcf

The .kcf file is a plain XML-like file containing key mappings (complete with keyboard modifiers):

<SONY_ERICSSON_REMOTE_CONTROL_CONFIGURATION VERSION="1.0">
  <KEYMAP>
    <KEY_1>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "29" />  <!-- 1= ESCAPE  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_1>
    <KEY_2>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "52" />  <!-- 2= UP ARROW  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_2>
    <KEY_3>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "04" USAGEID = "2B" />  <!-- 3= ALT+TAB  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_3>
    <KEY_4>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "50" />  <!-- 4= LEFT ARROW  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_4>
    <KEY_5>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "28" />  <!-- 5= RETURN  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_5>
    <KEY_6>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "4F" />  <!-- 6= RIGHT ARROW  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_6>
    <KEY_7>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "43" />  <!-- 7= F10  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_7>
    <KEY_8>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "00" USAGEID = "51" />  <!-- 8= DOWN ARROW  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_8>
    <KEY_9>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "06" USAGEID = "2B" />  <!-- 9= ALT+SHIFT+TAB  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_9>
    <KEY_STAR>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "05" USAGEID = "1E" />  <!-- *= CTRL+ALT+1  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_STAR>
    <KEY_0>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "05" USAGEID = "1F" />  <!-- 0= CTRL+ALT+2   -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_0>
    <KEY_HASH>
      <ACTION>
        <KEYBOARD MODIFIERS = "08" USAGEID = "00" />  <!-- #= LEFT GUI  -->
      </ACTION>
    </KEY_HASH>
  </KEYMAP>
</SONY_ERICSSON_REMOTE_CONTROL_CONFIGURATION>

Caveats

I was unable to get the to control any of my s before 10.3.5 came out, since was unable to anticipate a phone also being a HID device - the Bluetooth assistant refused to recognize the as a HID device, and persisted on calling it "just a phone".

It worked flawlessly with a vanilla installation of Windows , though, with the installing itself as both a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in 30 seconds flat using a and, later, with the 's standard Bluetooth stack.

Mind you, if you're doing presentations, you might want to disable Bluetooth power saving and keypad locks - sometimes the and the K600 go into "idle" mode, and it's fiddly to have to unlock the keypad and wait a couple of seconds for Bluetooth to become really active again.

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