Device Sharing over USB with remote, programmatic control (not a button)

Question

A friend and I are working on remote machines (i.e. a thousand miles away). They need to share a USB device, and there are many wonderful solutions for this such as

https://www.amazon.com/Kensington-ShareCentral-Device-Sharing-K33900US/dp/B0014IUVQA

The only problem is that the switch is manual, which is sufficient for most cases. But not good for Mr 1000-miles-away Superuser. Is anyone aware of a company that makes switches (USB or KVM) that can be controlled remotely, either by the host machines, or possibly via internet?

Answer 1

You actually answered your own question with a perfectly acceptable hardware rec!

The USB Switch acts like any KVM switch, press num-lock two times and it will switch over. Found this in a review...

From the reviewer on amazon - "Something I don't think anyone else has mentioned in other reviews (and that I discovered completely by accident) is that this switch will flip both of the USB connections from one computer to the other when you press Num-Lock twice in rapid succession"

You can create a little batch file on the desktop that fires the numlock keypress two times..

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys "{NUMLOCK}"
WshShell.SendKeys "{NUMLOCK}"

This little batch should send the keypresses to the host and get the USB device to flip over.

Let me know if this fits the bill, or if you're looking for something else :)