USB HID [Espruino Pico]

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-09-30 by user58211

I just wanted to ask if it's available to use Espruino Pico as a USB keyboard/mouse?
It's one of the stretch goals we've reached and as much as I heard from Gordon it will be added somewhere in the future.

Does anyone know how can I make my Espruino Pico board to start "typing" when plugged in?

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-09-30 by @gfwilliams

Sure, it's in the current latest version of the firmware - 1v80.

More info on how to do stuff here: http://www.espruino.com/USB

Sadly Windows doesn't recognize the USB HID devices (10 might be better?) but they work on other platforms

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Posted at 2015-09-30 by user58211

Cool, thanks!

Any idea why Windows OS doesn't recognize the USB HID devices? Maybe it expects to have a driver present in the device's flash drive somehow or it conflicts when it's "connected" to the Espruino Web IDE.

Is there any possible way to make it stable across all platforms or does it require something that's not included in the hardware?

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Posted at 2015-09-30 by @gfwilliams

Well, as far as I can tell, it's because Espruino enumerates as 2 USB devices - the virtual COM port (so you can talk to it) and the HID device.

I think Windows just looks at the USB ID and loads ST's driver for it, even though the board itself is saying it also supports HID.

Possibly someone could write in 'inf' file for it which would fix it - that'd be awesome but I don't know enough about Windows driver development for it.

The actual fix I was going to do in firmware was to just allow you to put it into a 'HID-only' mode (no com port) which I'm sure would work fine on everything. It's just a bit sad as once you do that you can then only debug Espruino by wiring up a USB-Serial converter to it!

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Posted at 2015-10-01 by user58211

I'm not any good at writing drivers myself, I mostly write apps and games in high-level languages. But just as a guess - wouldn't it be possible to program the board to load as normal and on a button press: change it's own mode, eject itself and then mount again with as a HID.

This is a pretty wild guess, but I figured it's possible, since even after being unmounted it would still have power supply from USB and resetting itself could be potentially possible.

It's also hard to predict for me how much processing time it would take to load instructions from flash into memory on such a board or if that part of firmware is even editable like that at all.

In any case, I'll try to look into the whole driver thing that you have on github and post a question on stackoverflow once I've studied the code. But as I told you, I'm very green in this whole thing, so I don't expect to do it better or sooner that you would :)

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Posted at 2015-10-01 by @gfwilliams

The inf file isn't even actually a driver - it's just a config file that says 'this device does X and Y and you need these (sometimes built-in) drivers'. So it may literally just be 10-20 lines of text that you need to get it to work - no compiling or drivers or anything.

But yes unmounting and then remounting could be done, and it's a neat idea. I'm not quite sure how I'd do that though - and actually it probably isn't much different from just unplugging it and re-plugging it?