Will an out of the box Raspberyy Pi 3+ see wireless mouse and keyboard?

[Chris Wilson]

Newbie question sorry, but will a new Raspberry Pi 3+ loaded with the "Noobs" OS see a wireless mouse and keyboard or do they need to be hard wired USB ones, at least initially? Many thanks! Oooh 1000 posts and a Super Contributor, but I am afraid I take a lot more than I give here...

[brucehoult]

Most "wireless" mice and keyboards use a small transceiver that plugs into a USB port. To the PC they look exactly the same as wired USB peripherals and work fine even for entering BIOSes etc.

Some mice and keyboards are advertised as "BlueTooth" rather than generic "wireless" in which case they need support from the OS (and BIOS if you want to use them that early). You can use these with a Pi but you need to be able to operate the Pi some other way (another keyboard, ssh) in order to set it up initially.

[SiliconWizard]

Note that RPis don't have any kind of "BIOS" per se, they just have a firmware that is completely unaccessible to the user (it can be configured with a text file on the SD card, and that's all.) So there's nothing to care about outside of the OS you're going to use.

So yeah, some or most of the wireless "dongles" for keyboards and mice are seen as HID devices from the OS POV, so they are recognized with no problem and yes, if you're dealing with bluetooth, check that the OS you're going to use supports it, and particularly supports bluetooth keyboards and mice. Any decent Linux distro with a decent desktop env. should, but I don't know much about the "Noobs" distribution.

[Chris Wilson]

Booted it up last night and it saw both the mouse and keyboard RF "dongles" fine and was up and running with no need for any messing. Many thanks for the advice!

[SiliconWizard]

Cool.

Just for the record: the embedded firmware that runs upon reset on the Pi's actually runs on the GPU (Videocore) and not on the CPU.
It initializes a number of things before handing execution to the CPU, which then executes code from what's on the SD card.