What's New in TinyPilot 1.1

TinyPilot recently reached its v1.1 milestone, which includes many exciting new features.

Mouse integration

Mouse integration was, by far, the most common feature that users requested for TinyPilot. Tons of TinyPilot customers manage Windows machines, where navigation without a mouse is burdensome.

TinyPilot now captures mouse input and forwards it to the target machine!

Performance is quick on a local network. If you're accessing TinyPilot over a slow connection, it will automatically throttle down mouse sensitivity to avoid flooding your connection with excessive mouse chatter.

Fullscreen mode

Want to make your local computer feel just like your remote machine?

Fullscreen mode lets you break your remote screen out of the browser window, creating an immersive experience on your local display.

Big thanks to @djclueless for contributing this feature, which often makes me forget I'm even typing on a remote server.

Paste text from clipboard

Many TinyPilot users keep their passwords in a password manager. Without the ability to paste text, they were forced to type out long, random passwords by hand. Not fun.

Supporting clipboard pasting is more complex than it would seem. For security reasons, browsers strictly limit web applications from accessing the clipboard. It's possible to overcome this limitation with browser plugins or ::shudder:: Java applets, but I want to keep TinyPilot lightweight, performant, and easy to use.

@pwcazenave and I worked together to find a solution in pure JavaScript. From the command menu, you can now click "Paste" and then paste text from your clipboard. TinyPilot will replicate that text on the remote machine.

TinyPilot's paste feature makes it easy to copy passwords or other forms of text between your local machine and your remote device.

AZERTY support

One of my customers in France reached out to ask if TinyPilot could support the French-style AZERTY keyboard layout. I had never used an AZERTY keyboard, so I picked one up off Amazon and started experimenting.

TinyPilot originally assumed a US-style QWERTY keyboard layout. After a few days of tinkering, I reorganized TinyPilot's code to support configurable keyboard layouts.

So far, TinyPilot only supports QWERTY and AZERTY, but it should be fairly straightforward to support additional keyboard types in the future.

To configure your TinyPilot for AZERTY layout, run this command before installing or upgrading TinyPilot:

export TINYPILOT_INSTALL_VARS="keyboard_layout=azerty"

Upgrading to TinyPilot 1.1

Running an earlier version of TinyPilot? Upgrading is easy.

SSH into your TinyPilot, and run the following bash commands:

curl \
  --silent \
  --show-error \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot/master/quick-install | \
    bash - && \
  sudo reboot