So I had a meeting with Tom Igoe (ITP/NYU professor and co-author of
Physical Computing) yesterday to discuss how to make generic Pd support
for sensorboxes. We agreed that the best approach would be to propose
a standard protocol for sensorboxes to support, regardless if they are
USB, serial, parallel, etc. (MIDI would probably have to be distinct).
We also agreed that HID makes a lot of sense as the standard protocol.
(OSC might be a better choice too. Maybe. But then you loose the
possibility of emulating mice, joysticks, etc. and having them "just
work")
(It was funny, during the meeting, we'd discuss various ideas, and come
to a conclusion. More than once, I said, "oh wait, the MultIO already
does this...".)
So in order to make this work, on the Pd side of things, there would
need to be an object that can interpret raw HID data and output in the
same format as [hid]. This object would not need to have the same
limitations that the USB HID implementations have, it could have
different MAX values that the USB Usage Pages or the Linux input.h
types. Anyone know of some USB HID parsing code to start with?
(On a related OT question, how hard would it be to port MultIO/PIC code
to Arduino/ATMEL?)
.hc
As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously.
- Benjamin Franklin