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Date:      Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:32:30 -0500
From:      Andre Guibert de Bruet <andy@siliconlandmark.com>
To:        "Gary R. Van Sickle" <g.r.vansickle@att.net>
Cc:        lcdproc@lists.omnipotent.net, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: [Lcdproc] LCDProc CVS + PicoLCD on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <C6F61B9C-A765-4F35-9BF7-E744B2F19C99@siliconlandmark.com>
In-Reply-To: <17C934E643C24C478EAA0C15A2D898EB@DFW5RB41>
References:  <1b9f9a570901141518q1ba70c73ibc58a4f32811e254@mail.gmail.com><496EE1D9.7090309@nurfuerspam.de> <C15FEE10-7A0C-4E5B-AB57-799FA4094EDA@siliconlandmark.com> <17C934E643C24C478EAA0C15A2D898EB@DFW5RB41>

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On Jan 16, 2009, at 5:09 AM, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:

>> From: Andre Guibert de Bruet
>>
>> Unfortunately the PicoLCD 2X20 and 4X20 devices present
>> themselves as HID devices.
>
> ...but... they *are* HID devices.  Why is this "unfortunate"?

The PicoLCD 4X20 devices offer a bunch of different bits of  
functionality:
- A 4x20 character display.
- 8 physical buttons.
- An IR receiver.

It is "unfortunate" because the FreeBSD HID implementation (Along with  
OSX, Linux and Windows') has no clue what to do why any of these. It  
is way more useful for a program to be able to attach to the device  
and interact with it in a user-configurable way. You may want to have  
the display print out the output of a program (Such as lcdproc or  
lcdexec), have the buttons map to commonly-used scripts and have the  
IR controller hooked up to lirc, for example.

>> I filed PR usb/128803 and attached
>> a patch which quirks the device, so that it doesn't get
>> attached to by the HID driver (Thus making it available to
>> libusb). It can be found at
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=128803
>>  . It would be awesome if this would get committed on
>> CURRENT and possibly MFC'ed... :)
>
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but how would that be awesome?   
> Wouldn't it
> be significantly more awesome if these HID devices were communicated  
> with in
> the same manner as any other HID device?  Or is FreeBSD's HID  
> support really
> that broken?

It has nothing to do with FreeBSD being broken. As stated above, this  
quirk allows third-party programs to connect to the device and  
interact with it. Note that this device's smaller brother, the PicoLCD  
2X20 is already being quirked in the USB stack.

Cheers,

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