On Monday, Jun 14, 2004, at 13:17 US/Pacific, Matthew Brush wrote:

> I'm aware that you can BUY all kinds of different things, but the
> point is to modify something to work for free.

It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately, a mouse port has a bunch
of disadvantages for this sort of application.  It tends to be
unidirectional (as far as I know), and mostly, it's a MOUSE.  The
system software will recognize it as a mouse and data will start moving
the cursor around, making windows respond, and so on.  (most OSes seem
to support an arbitary number of mice simultaneously.)  It's not like
an application can say "I want to trap the keyclick info from "mouse3:"

A com port adaptor has a lot of advantages.  It's bidirectional, and
relatively protocol free.  Just a bare data stream.  You can sort of
expect things like 'copy myfile com5:' and 'copy com5: myfile' to work
just fine, even if there is NOTHING like an actual comport on the other
side USB "thing" pretending to be a com port.  I guess there are
generic "HID" devices that behave similarly; microchips pickit1 being a
nice example with published source code..

I notice that the pic16c745 sells for prices comparable to things like
the FTDI chip.  Open source code for turning a 16c745 into a general
purpose USB IO device would probably be pretty useful, even if it isn't
available as a flash device.

BillW

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