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Comment by deltaburnt | Hacker News Reader

After going down the hellish rabbit hole of KVM and thunderbolt dock shopping, I started to fantasize about doing a project like this. So many horror stories of cheap electronics frying your ports, the switch adding input delays, etc. It's not that I didn't want to shell out the money, but it seemed like all the recommended solutions were either ancient (still had VGA connections) or were enterprise grade (close to $1000). I would have settled for a little robot arm that just physically unplugs one USB cable and plugs in another.

Essentially I found that the easiest way to swap between my computers is to physically disconnect a thunderbolt cable from one and plug it into another. As far as I can tell there's no such thing as a thunderbolt switch, so this is the local minima I'm stuck in until I try and make my own solution.

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If you have a monitor that can serve as a USB hub (pretty easy to find) and has a thunderbolt input (less easy to find but there are options), you can hook multiple machines up to the monitor and use `ddccontrol` to toggle the monitor's active input. The devices hooked up to the monitor via USB can then follow the monitor to any of the connected computers.

I have my mouse, keyboard, and webcam plugged into my monitor. The monitor is connected to both my work laptop and personal desktop. I wrote a script using `ddccontrol` that I have bound to a hotkey on the laptop and desktop which toggles the active input. Switching the display and USB peripherals back and forth between the two machines is just a keyboard hotkey.

The commands look something like this: `ddccontrol -r 0x60 -w 3855 dev:/dev/i2c-7 >/dev/null 2>&1'

With the exact arguments dependent on your particular hardware.

Damn, I didn't know usb on monitor was a thing. This could work for me if I get a new monitor since I use a single display for multiple boxes. Maybe I could try Synergy too with the ddccontrol command

I use a software called Synergy.

https://symless.com/synergy

I have one keyboard and mouse connected to one "host" machine, and two machines connected as clients.

Sometimes if the host machine bogs a bit (like running a build or something) then the clients will have some latency but I've used this setup for gaming and work for two years and it's been pretty good.

My only complaint (about my personal setup, not the software) is that one machine has absolutely no peripherals attached to it aside from a monitor, so if I need to update the software, I need to connect a keyboard and mouse in order to do so.

Again, an issue with my setup and a caveat of using software as opposed to hardware.

This was indeed my first approach, but my employer disallows the use of synergy between personal and corporate devices (I could use it across two corporate devices though).

Thunderbolt 3/4 Switch for about $400 Canadian https://www.amazon.ca/Thunderbolt-Peripheral-Charging-Suppor...

That's what I do too. Thunderbolt is excellent, but it would be nice to not need to physically swap cables.

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