Plug and Go request

[whaleygeek]

From: Dr James Dalley

There was some talk a few months ago about a HID based driver for this library, so that we can avoid all driver setup issues on Windows (especially on win 8.1 which is complicated by the driver enforcement and multiple boot's required to get the sparkfun driver installed). In my mind, this is the most important thing to add to anyio next.

[whaleygeek]

I looked into this a few weeks ago, and whilst it was simple to make the sparkfun ProMicro advertise itself as a HID keyboard or a HID mouse, there is no access to the underlying HID reports this way, due to the operating system taking over at the lowest level and feeding these reports directly to the OS kernel and, basically, making it a keyboard or a mouse. So, just using the standard sparkfun example for keyboard and mouse is not enough - you might as well use MakeyMakey for that, and you still don't get a channel to send data to the ProMicro for GPIO output.

I did spend some time investigating the python HID wrappers on windows in particular, and it was a little inconclusive at that time as to whether it would be possible to create something that was truly "plug and go" using the lower level HID reports. It is possible (although unconfirmed) that plugging in a non-mouse non-keyboard HID device in order to gain access to raw HID reports as a way to transfer data, would suffer the same "you must install this as a non-secure driver" issue on windows.

I will continue this investigation later this year, to see if there is a way to build a HID that is recognised out of the box by Windows, but I don't hold much hope yet unfortunately.

[whaleygeek]

Yeah, as I had suspected, I think this is going to be pretty hard to do reliably on all platforms. I don't envisage having a solution to this before end of 2014

[whaleygeek]

I spoke to some people in the community, and apparently it is possible to add HID support for driverless install, but it needs a bit of work. I'll leave this one parked for the moment, but it looks possible in the future. This would be great, because it would mean in a school, for example, you would not need to faff with driver install, you could just plug it in and it would work.