[Lcdproc] LCDProc CVS + PicoLCD on FreeBSD

[Andre Guibert de Bruet]

On Jan 16, 2009, at 5:09 AM, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:

>> From: Andre Guibert de Bruet
>>
>> Unfortunately the PicoLCD 2X20 and 4X20 devices present
>> themselves as HID devices.
>
> ...but... they *are* HID devices.  Why is this "unfortunate"?

The PicoLCD 4X20 devices offer a bunch of different bits of  
functionality:
- A 4x20 character display.
- 8 physical buttons.
- An IR receiver.

It is "unfortunate" because the FreeBSD HID implementation (Along with  
OSX, Linux and Windows') has no clue what to do why any of these. It  
is way more useful for a program to be able to attach to the device  
and interact with it in a user-configurable way. You may want to have  
the display print out the output of a program (Such as lcdproc or  
lcdexec), have the buttons map to commonly-used scripts and have the  
IR controller hooked up to lirc, for example.

>> I filed PR usb/128803 and attached
>> a patch which quirks the device, so that it doesn't get
>> attached to by the HID driver (Thus making it available to
>> libusb). It can be found at
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=128803
>>  . It would be awesome if this would get committed on
>> CURRENT and possibly MFC'ed... :)
>
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but how would that be awesome?   
> Wouldn't it
> be significantly more awesome if these HID devices were communicated  
> with in
> the same manner as any other HID device?  Or is FreeBSD's HID  
> support really
> that broken?

It has nothing to do with FreeBSD being broken. As stated above, this  
quirk allows third-party programs to connect to the device and  
interact with it. Note that this device's smaller brother, the PicoLCD  
2X20 is already being quirked in the USB stack.

Cheers,

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