Transform a Cheap USB Switch Into a 4K KVM with Monitor Mash

Due to the pandemic, more people are working from home than ever before, leveraging home offices for increased productivity. Others, such as WFCarpenter, have used their spare time for ingenuity, designing or modifying devices to help with their workflow, such as transforming a simple USB switch into a 4K KVM to take advantage of HD monitors.

WFCarpenter's company hooked him up with an office PC for work purposes, but he has his own for everything else. Both PCs have multiple 4K outputs that can take advantage of his Asus 4K display, but he wanted a solution to switch between computers but use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

Not wanting to spend the money on buying a KVM switch that can easily handle that problem for him, WJCarpenter decided to convert a USB switch instead. "For a while, I operated by hitting the USB switch for the keyboard and mouse and then using my monitor's built-in controls for switching between the two video inputs," he noted." "That worked fine, but it's amazing how lazy you can become, and then you start thinking that doing two things to switch between computers is just an agonizing exertion."

After some searching, WJCarpenter found an article that detailed how to turn a USB switch into a full-featured KVM, but rather than use the tutorial, he chose to use it as inspiration (due to reasons). That's when Carpenter caught wind of the ddcutil utility that would allow him to switch systems but retain his HD monitor. After a few protocol tweaks in a Linux environment, he was able to switch between his PC and the Windows-based work platform without issue, except it doesn't scale well beyond two PCs.