Since I find the default gamepad handling of Windows to be lacking, I'd like to write a custom interface for that purpose. Basically, I want to add a layer between the plugged in gamepads and the Windows gamecontroller management. While I'm not sure how to tackle this problem, these are the steps I was thinking off so far:
Disconnect any plugged in gamepads from Windows' gamecontroller management
Create virtual gamecontroller (perhaps with vJoy/pyvjoy)
Read inputs from the plugged in gamepads and apply them to the virtual gamecontrollers
However, apart from the second bullet point I don't know whether (and how) these are doable. Are there any APIs that can interact with devices the way that I need to? Do I need to get into driver programming and rewrite gamepad drivers?
I know this is a broad question to a very narrow topic, but I'm kind of at a loss where to get started. Any help would be much appreciated.
HIDGuardian covers your first bullet point:
https://github.com/nefarius/ViGEm/tree/master/Sys/HidGuardian
HIDGuardian is used by InputMapper to hide the physical gamepad when a virtual gamepad has been created for the device. This prevents applications from seeing input from the same gamepad twice.
Related
I'm nxj beginner.
I have some questions about bluetooth communication between PC and brick.
First, when bluetooth communication occurs, where is the birthplace processing this datas?
In other words, I want to know whether these datas will be processed on CPU or brick.
Second, what is exact roles CPU and brick in bluethooth communication?
That means what is processed on CPU and what is processed on brick.
I have searched almost web site but I can't find this anywhere.
Please help me. Thanks.
You can see it in the package structure.
lejos.nxt.*
This package contains classes running on the NXT-brick. All code in this package will be compiled for the brick and will run on the brick.
lejos.pc.*
Here the difference is not that clear. This is java-code you compile for personal computer. So most code runs on your computer. But some classes (e.g: RemoteMotorController) only send messages to the NXT-brick which gives commands to the motors.
lejos.pc.comm provides API's that allow you to communicate/control the nxt robot from the PC.
When importing the the libs to an Android project, it allows you to build an instance of the same environment used on a pc, but within android.
I agree it can be tough finding some things out. It would be great if there was as stronger lejos presence on SO
This question is months old and has remained un-answered I actually have a lot of questions about it myself, but I might be able to provide some insight for utter novices.
when using bluetooth with Android and NXJ robots, you use either lejos.pc.comm or lejos.NXJ.
Both provide APi's to do almost the same thing, but work a little differently. I don't know nearly enough about the NXJ api, but I do know that it is the one that lets you manipulate the robot much more effectively, such as outputting data to it's LCD screen, which you can't do with the pc.comm api
As far as I can tell, the pc.comm API uses both Android Bluetooth API's and it's own protocols to allow communication with Lego LCP commands.
(I want to come back to this, but I'm writing a dissert on the topic so I'll try to update it in a couple of days. Seems not many are interested though, shame)
I want to use a second pointing device (the trackball) as a control for a specific function on a program. This means I would NOT want any mouse functionality from the trackball, I just want to get the movement data and somehow use the NPAPI to get that into our web app. Is there a way to bind a mouse/trackball to a specific program that it doesn't act as a mouse/trackball for the computer?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATED: actually ask a question
To the best of my knowledge and my understanding of how HID devices work, there is no way to do what you want to do. If you could do it at all, you could probably do it from an NPAPI plugin, but there is no way to tell the operating system not to take control of one specific pointing device as opposed to any others.
Now, if you had a special HID trackball that didn't show up as being a regular pointing device then you could possibly do it with that, but I have never heard of any way to take control of just one of potentially many HID pointing devices on windows, linux, or mac.
There may be a way to hack something together in Linux by changing the way the drivers work, etc, but I don't know of any.
I find myself in the need of a software to control lights with a programmable interface. Basically what I want to do is to automatically control the lights using some criteria that I programmed inside a program. My program will then control the lights passing through the software I'm searching for, of course this would need a programmable interface to which I should pass the commands to control the lights.
I've been searching for a software like that in the last couple of days without success, what I found are only softwares with GUIs for users, but no specification whatsoever about programming the light behavior instead of manipulating it by hand.
There's some really good information & code samples (including a working class that I wrote) here: Lighting USB OpenDMX FTD2XX DMXking
Ultimately, you end up setting byte values (between 0 and 255[FF] (brightest) in a byte array.
It's fairly trivial to implement simple effects such as fades or chases.
If you haven't got that far yet (e.g. up to the code) you'll need to get ahold of a USB DMX controller.
There are a number of them out there, but the thread above has sample code for two different flavours.
I also wanted an environment where I could quickly write code that would create interesting effects for my DMX effect lights and lasers, and ended up creating it myself. I just announced the first public release of Afterglow, my free, open-source live-coding environment for light shows. You can find it at https://github.com/brunchboy/afterglow
I needed precise control of individual mutli-channel (RGBAW) DMX512 lights and wanted to write code in C++ for Windows. I adapted the C# example from Enttec's website for OpenUSB and released the code:
https://github.com/chloelle/DMX_CPP
Is it possible to get location data out of Google Gears, Google Gelocation API or any other web location API (such as Fire Eagle) in such a format that it appears to other software as a GPS device?
It occured to me reading these answers to my question regarding WiFi location finding, on Super User, that if I could emulate a GPS unit, many of these web services could act as a 'poor-mans' GPS to otherwise less useful software that requires it.
Is GPSD an option?
Preferably OSX & Python, but I would be interested in any implementation.
There is a very similar thread on a Python mailinglist that mentions Windows virtual COM ports and discusses Unix's pseudo-tty capabilities. If the app(s) you want to use let you type in a specific tty device file, this may be the easiest route. (Short of asking the authors to provide a plugin API for what you're trying to do, or buying yourself a $20 bluetooth GPS mouse.)
Are you using OS X?
There is a project macosxvirtualserialport on Google code that provides a graphical wrapper around some of the features of a utility called socat. I'd recommend taking a look at socat if you see potential in the pseudo-tty route. I believe you could use socat to link a pipe from a Python program to a pseudo-tty.
Most native Mac apps will be querying IOServiceMatching for a device with kIOSerialBSDRS232Type, and I doubt that a pseudo-tty will show up as an IOKit service.
In this case, unless you can find a project that has already implemented such a thing, you will need to implement a driver as described in this How to create virtual COM port thread. If you're going to the trouble of create a device driver, you would want to base it on IOKit because of that likely IOServiceMatching query. You can find the Apple16X50Serial project mentioned in that post at the top of Apple's open source code list (go to the main page and pick an older OS release if you want to target something pre-10.6).
If your app is most useful with realtime data (e.g. the RouteBuddy app mentioned in the Python mailinglist thread can log current positions) then you will want to fetch updates from your web sources (hopefully they support long-polling) and convert them to basic NMEA RMC sentences. You do not want to do this from inside your driver code. Instead, divide your work up into kernel-land and user-land pieces that can communicate, and put as little of the code as possible into the kernel part.
If you want to let apps both read and write to these web services, your best bet would probably be to simulate a Garmin device. Garmin has more-or-less documented their protocol in the IntfSpec.pdf file included with their Device Interface SDK. Again, you'd want to split as much as you could into user-space code.
I was unable to find a project or utility that implements the kernel side of an IOKit-based virtual serial interface, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't one hiding somewhere out there. Unfortunately, most of the answers I found to that question were like this, with the developer being told to get busy writing a kext.
I'm not exactly sure how to accomplish what you're asking, but I may be able to lend some insight as to how you might begin to get it done. So here goes:
A GPS device shows up to most systems as nothing more than a serial device -- a.k.a. a COM port if you're dealing with Windows, /dev/ttySx if you're in *nix. By definition, a serial port's specific duty is to stream data across a bus, one block at a time. So, it would then follow logically that if you want to emulate the presence of a GPS device, you should gather the data you're consuming and put it into a stream that somehow acts like an active serial port.
There are, however, some complications you might want to consider:
Most GPS devices don't just send out location data; there's also information on satellite locations, fix quality, bearing, and so on. Then again, nobody's made any rules saying you have to make all that data available. There's probably more to this, but I'll admit that I need to do more research in this area myself.
I'm not sure how fast you can receive data when dealing with Google Latitude, etc., but any delays in receiving would definitely result in visible pauses in your "serial port"'s data stream. Again, this may not be as big a complication as it seems, because GPS devices are known to "burst" data across the bus anyway, but I'd definitely keep an eye on that. You want to make sure there's always a surplus of data coming across, not a shortage.
Along the way you'll also have to transform the coordinates you receive into valid GPS sentences, as well. You can find specifications for those, but I would definitely make friends with the NMEA standard -- even though it is a flawed standard, it's the one everyone seems to agree on anyway.
Hope this helped you, at least a little bit. Are there anymore details specific to your problem that you think could be useful in answering this question?
Take a look to Franson GPS Gate which allows you to connect to Google Earth among other things (like simulating GPS and so on). Is windows only though but I think you could get some useful ideas from it.
I haven't looked into it very much, but have you considered using Skyhook's SDK? It might provide you with some of what you are looking for. It's available for every major desktop and mobile OS.
How to write simpliest audio virtual device driver in WinXP? I know that one way is to write a WDM driver but I suppose it is not an easyly task. I need to implement some audio filtering for a Flash based application. Unfortunatelly it seems that it is the only way to do it - outside a Flash, by a device driver, then a Flash app can attach to my virtual device.
I was wondering if I can write a device driver using some high level API (higher that WDM), maybe UMDF as virtual usb audio device(?) or maybe only some dll which will register a virtual device. As I can see Google Talk plugin contain googleadapter.dll which provfides virtual webcams, I wonder how they wrote it.
Thanks in advance,
ternyk
For WinXP it is enough to write Installable Driver which is a simple user-mode dll. However it will not work under Vista or higher because they have different audio model.
What API? First thing i'd worry about is learning how the app(s) interface with Windows and the best way to do this is to actually learn how to code an application with audio using the same interface. So, if it uses DirectSound audio, learn how to code an application which uses DirectSound.
The reason i say this is that once you know how your code works you will also know what API need to be hooked. Then it goes from there, code the loader/dll injector so that it performs what you're after.
Finally, don't forget to use Google to do as much research on your own first:
[quote]Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day... Teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry again...[/quote]