On 25 aug 2006, at 05.02, Jason Dagit wrote:
Hello,
I recently became the owner a USB gadget that tracks movement via GPS
and also tracks heart rate (it's a training device for athletes).
This device comes with software that is windows only and...doesn't
like up to it's potential (to put it politely). Being a programmer
type and someone that prefers to use either linux or osx I quickly
realized I should write my own software to use the gadget.
Fortunately, the company that makes the device provides documentation
to write drivers for the device (including a minimal example USB
driver for win32).
So then I looked around the net for a few open source things, such as
open source drivers for the device or a Haskell library to help me
start writing drivers for the gadget. I didn't see anything relevant
after a few minutes of searching so I figure that means there isn't
much.
Did I miss a Haskell library for writing device drivers, specifically
USB drivers? Would this be hard to write? I would prefer to support
osx and linux at a minimum and I think it would be ideal to shoot for
cross platform (win32, osx, linux and *bsd). I have this feeling that
it could be done by writing platform specific wrappers using hsc2hs on
each platform then bringing them together through a unified 'low'
level Haskell api. The Haskell api would then be exposed as a module
for application developers.
Any thoughts?
For the interested, the documentation I spoke of can be found here:
http://www.garmin.com/support/commProtocol.html
For cross-platform USB drivers, you may want to have a look at libusb
[1]. I have only used it under Linux, but it seems to support Linux,
*BSD and OS X. There also seems to be a win32 port [2]. A Haskell
binding to libusb would be very welcome.
/Björn
[1] http://libusb.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://libusb-win32.sourceforge.net/
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