Re: IFeel support

[Adam G. <ad...@ev...>]

I have a couple such mice, and I had wanted to start such work last summer.

But I ran into a few issues, and kind of just put things on hold.
Perhaps these are now adequately solved?

Issues:

 * The HID driver which controls mice and mice-like devices had no support
   for force feedback stuff, and I really didn't want to make a 
   completely new driver which was specific to the iFeel and yet
   was 99% identical to the generic HID stuff.

 * When I was playing with libusb in testing, I orginially was sending
   control transfers (which usb-robot supported). But I found out that
   the (more-correct?) way to drive the device was through interrupt
   transfers, which libusb didn't support. Does this now work with
   "one-shot interrupt" support in usbdevfs?

 * It seemed like overkill to build a full kernel space driver for this
   device. This is the big question:

   Should the iFeel be controlled by the generic HID driver like a normal
   mouse, with some additional user space stuff (like libusb) controlling
   the vibration?


I think the user space vs. kernel space issue is important. What does
everyone think?


Points:

 * User space driver: does not require (much?) modification to existing
                      kernel drivers, should be easier to develop and
                      test, but might cause issues related to finding
                      the correct devices and perhaps permissions problems

 * Kernel space driver: might require making a whole new driver or
                        adding special cases to the existing HID structures,
                        needs some userspace stuff anyway (to manage
                        interaction with GUI elements, etc.)


These are just some issues, but I am leaning towards just having a
user space driver. I am looking forward to comments on this....



Adam




On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 10:06:49AM +0100, Johann Deneux wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone have an IFeel mouse at hand here ? Information about the
> protocol can be found here:
> http://moore.cx/out/ifeel/
> 
> If no one with an IFeel mouse feels like starting to implement a driver
> using the information available above, I may well volunteer to do it, but
> that means I would need to buy such a mouse.
> 
> -- 
> Johann Deneux
> 
> 
> 
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