Awhile back I was looking at cheap ways to automate drive imaging on a air gapped PC. There are KVM hardware products that simulate mouse,keyboard, sometimes USB drives. I have a couple of them from that time period, the main problem is they have their own janky software that only works on Windows to run them.
It occurs to me that barcode scanner is an adjacent idea and probably has some versatility advances. Really what they wanted was a way to send stored keystrokes from one PC to another and the barcode was just a commonly available way to do it.
Something like a USB rubber ducky (https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky) would probably work great for this use case. They market it towards pentesting but it's useful for automating general system administration as well.
It occurs to me that barcode scanner is an adjacent idea and probably has some versatility advances. Really what they wanted was a way to send stored keystrokes from one PC to another and the barcode was just a commonly available way to do it.