USBDemo, something to learn USB a little bit

[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

[SterlingY]

Of course I took your excellent example and tore it all apart to modify it into something completely useless to me.

I'm not getting data from USBbufferin on the device. I am kind of curious about a line in the VB side:

"hidWriteEx VendorID, ProductID, BufferOut(0) ' send it"

Doesn't that just send the first element of the array? On the device I am trying to read USBbufferin[2] but get nothing. I should point out that my version has this as a normal BYTE, not the LSB of another number or whatever you had.


-Sterling

[SterlingY]

More info:

In the VB code, if I put the following line "BufferOut(2) = 145" in the WriteSomeData() function, I get "0" when reading on the device, however, If I put that same line in the Form_Load() function, it sends the data, so I think the Form is constantly reloading. How can this be?

-Sterling

[SterlingY]

I seem to be talking to myself here, but that's okay.

I just wanted to say that I got it working. I don't know how. But, I ran the original USBDEMO.exe, and then everything started working with my modified version.

Crazy, I know!

-Sterling

[SterlingY]

Here I go again:

The problem was that VB buffer(1) comes into the device as buffer[2]