USBDemo, something to learn USB a little bit

[SterlingY]

This message will now be rendered useless. I wanted to delete it, but since I can't, I've put this stupid line here.

[Squibcakes]

Hi,

Having a problem with the MCHID.DLL.

My HID device works well on my development PC - but when I plug it into another PC (both running XP), windows automatically assigns it's own HID.DLL, and thus the device doesnt work. (It appears in devicemanager correctly)

How do I force XP to use the MCHID.DLL when there are no .inf files to use?

Cheers
Squib.

[Noise.be]

I've always MCHID.DLL in the same dir as the executable :-) that helps

[Squibcakes]

Yeah but... let me clarify,

I've made a USB HID device (rudder pedals for my flight sim to replace my old gameport rudder pedals) and used Easy HID to make the necessary files.

When I plug it into the my Development PC with PBP etc installed, windows detects and it installs them perfectly! The pedals shows up in the game controllers list automatically and I can use them properly, ie calibrate them.

But when I plug the pedals into my Gaming PC, windows detects them and intalls a driver for it (show up in the system device list), but it doesn't show up in the game controllers list, thus I can't use the peddals.

I've tried other pc and the same happens.

I'm not creating any application to go with these pedals, I just want to plug them into any pc and have it work.

I'm not sure if it is a driver issue, or just a blonde moment. LOL.

Cheers

[SterlingY]

mister e,

Great stuff. A lot of good things to learn in your example.

So I've decided to make my own version, but I have run into a hurdle with EasyHID. Has anyone had trouble installing it? I need to mcHID.dll, but I can't install the software on my XP64 machine. The setup.exe program just seems to hang, without ever bringing up the install screen. And on my win2K machine, I get an error that it can't create the mcHID in the winnt/system32 folder.

Any thoughts?

-Sterling

[SterlingY]

I was able to just put the mcHID.dll in the Visual Basic project folder where my project files are located. That solved working with VB, but I still don't have the easyHID program at my disposal. Maybe I will just have to slug it out by hand.

-Sterling

[Squibcakes]

OK, got it sussed!

The problem was in my report descriptor section..... originally, I had setup up a "joystick" descriptor, which worked, but then later I changed the descriptor to a "simulator control".

The confusing thing was that windows was happy to use this new descriptor, and I figure the HID PID/VID sections in the registery never got updated (ie windows still recognised the pedals as a joystick).

When I plugged them into another PC for the first time, windows installed the pedals as a simulator control and that is why they didn't show up into the game devices list.

After changing the report descriptor scetion back to a joystick - all is working!

I guess the moral of the story here is that if you use the same VID/PID for different USB applications your USB device may not install properly.

I found that just removing the usb device from the device manager isn't enough, as you may need to delete all keys in the registry that ref. the paticular PID/VID device.

Clear as #*$#@!! mud?

As for installing EasyHID - I haven't had any problems installing (XP Pro 32). I don't suppose you can set compatabillity to XP(32) for the setup file?

Cheers Squib