Keyboard control for HP Otto 🤖

The HP Otto remote used to let you drive the robot from the keyboard. A recent version dropped the key bindings — which is a shame when you want to sumo-fight the little machines from a laptop at AI dětem camp. This puts them back.

It's a small userscript: it runs on app.hprobots.com and turns key presses into taps on the on-screen controls. The remote is a Flutter canvas with no real buttons underneath, so you point it at the controls once (a quick click-to-calibrate step) and then drive.

Install

1. Install a userscript manager — Tampermonkey (Chrome / Edge) or Violentmonkey. Use a Chromium browser.
2. ⬇ Install Otto Keys — the manager will open its install screen; confirm it.
3. Open app.hprobots.com/control and connect your robot as usual. A small ⌨️ Otto Keys panel appears in the bottom-left corner.
4. Click Calibrate and, when prompted, click each control on the remote (Forward, Back, Left, Right, Stop). That's it — the positions are remembered in your browser.

Keys

Hold a direction to keep moving; let go to release. If you press a second direction while holding one, the newest wins — release it and the robot falls back to the one still held (so you never get a dead stop from two keys at once). Keys use the physical key position, so W A S D work on Czech QWERTZ layouts too.

Good to know

• Recalibrate if you resize the window or the layout shifts and a key starts hitting the wrong spot — it's the same one-click step.
• Typing in the robot's code editor is safe — the script stands down whenever a text field is focused.
• If a robot keeps moving after you release a key, tick “repeat while held” in the panel — some firmware wants the command re-sent, not just held.
• Use Disable in the panel to hand the keyboard back to the app.

Source is a single file: otto-keys.user.js. More on how it works in the blog post.