[kfeuz]

I recently configured a raspberry pi zero w with raspbian + kodi.  I am also using retrogame (from adafruit) to allow GPIO buttons to be recognized as virtual keys.  When I first set this up Kodi did not recognize the key presses despite them working correctly in other applications (terminal, showkey, etc).  After digging into the code (xbmc/input/linux/LinuxInputDevices.cpp) it looks like kodi attempts to classify inputs as keyboard, remote, joystick, multitouch, etc. but these heuristics currently leave the GPIO virtual keyboard unclassified and hence all buttons presses get ignored.  Several users have posted about this issue in the support threads (tid:273043, tid:317174, and tid:283346).  All of these have been solved by changing how things get reported to kodi but none of them address the underlying issue of what happens when your input device only has a limited number of buttons which don't meet the heuristics used for classifying devices.  I can easily change the code to get things to work but I don't know if I would be breaking something.  In other words I don't know what the motivation for classifying the different devices and ignoring unclassified device input is.  I would be happy to work on a patch to resolve the issue but would like some guidance about the correct way to proceed.  My first two ideas would be to not ignore unclassified devices or to broaden the criteria used to recognize one of the types of devices (keyboard, remote or joystick?).  Any feedback would be appreciated.  Thanks!