On 8/25/06, Bjorn Bringert
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.
This is interesting, although it looks a bit under developed and forgotten about at the moment. A few things worry me about it, like lack of async IO support, but overall it's probably a nice starting point. If nothing else I doubt it would be difficult to get a small wrapper library up and running based on it. Thanks for the pointer. Jason