Follow up:
After lots of googleing and looking, the answers were here in front of me: On a raspberry pi :
thd (trigger happy daemon- I love the name) can be started to run on /dev/input/event0 (in my case) and trigger programs that will run (like socket UDP in my case). See the man pages for thd
I could never get it to work as a keyboard, I must be missing something.....how is that done?
It works great!