The device is a toy robotic arm, with 5 motors and an LED light.
There are no sensors in the device, thus no way to programmatically determine where the arm is. Even when the limits are reached, there's no feedback to the on-device chip to turn off the motors.
There are mechanical limits that audibly click when the movement has reached its limits, but the user must be able to see the device and stop before those limits are reached.
It's sold as:
- Maplin A37JN Robotic Arm
- OWI Robotic Arm Edge
This is a command-line only tool that assumes you have exactly one joypad. The code to talk to the device is complete, but the joystick handling is minimal, and there's no UI.
Configuring for different joypad layouts currently requires
recompiling - the settings are at the top of input_config.cpp.
Dependencies:
- SDL
- libusb 1.0
I wrote this to practise with an in-kernel driver, this project simply being the client.
But there's almost no reason to need an in-kernel module rather than using libusb. So having implemented the kernel driver driving one motor and the light, I continued with this project using plain libusb.
Having it in the kernel does mean that a few edge cases can be handled, but the one that I know of is very much an edge case. Specifically hibernating your PC while the motors are running.
Copyright 2013 Steve Cotton
Thanks to Vadim Zaliva for reverse-engineering the protocol. http://notbrainsurgery.livejournal.com/38622.html
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.