[Soekris] Console input clarification (re: USB keyboard and other devices)

[Rick Morris]

I have noticed several posts in the soekris lists regarding USB 
keyboards, but none seems to have resolved the issue I am trying to 
figure out:

Is there any way to connect a USB keyboard to a soekris box (4801 in our 
case) and use that AS the input to the root console? We don't need 
monitor, mouse or anything else, but we have a proximity card reader for 
authentication that presents itself as a USB keyboard (for each card 
swipe, a small string+CRLF is sent).

Just to explain, my current tests (using FreeBSD 6.2) shows that FreeBSD 
detects the device as a USB keyboard (/dev/kbd2 from /dev/ukbd0), but 
there is no way I can discover to read input from it. On a regular x86 
box running FreeBSD, I can have a script in startup that automatically 
begins grabbing all stdin from the USB keyboard, but this does not 
produce any results on the 4801. This is with identical settings in 
/etc/ttys for both systems (ttyv0 and ttyd0 are on).

With sysctl on a regular x86 system, I see "kern.console: 
consolectl,/ttyd0,consolectl," but on the 4801 it is "kern.console: 
ttyd0,/ttyd0,". Should I conclude from this that there is no way to 
treat a USB keyboard as the main console input, and I must figure out 
some more involved way to read from that USB device? If so, any hints on 
where to start? (treat it as a HID device, for example?)

Thanks for any help,

-- 
Rick Morris
Head Application Developer
NetCompass, LLC -- www.netcompass.us
rmorris at netcompass.us
305-728-3724