HID Enhancements

[Bartman]

I played around with my Desktop MX and i found it.

[kingtd]

Works beautifully! Thanks for such a quick response to an esoteric problem. Now I can prototype my eventghost configuration on one machine and copy it to the other 3 without having to tweak it manually.

Basically I've got a few XP machines that are used for business during the day and gaming at night. They're within viewing distance of a Vista Media Center PC hooked to a projector and full surround sound system. I have it so that if you hold down the menu button on the logitech keyboard for 3 seconds, it toggles control over to the MCE machine so that you don't have to get up to switch channels or change tracks. With my Harman Kardon plugin I wrote, I can also control power, inputs, and volume on the receiver and projector.

I've struggled for more than a year trying to get girder to do half of this _reliably_. It took less than 2 weeks with Eventghost to surpass the level of control I had before. I'm working on tying in my motorized blinds and X10 lighting and then I'll truly have a fully automated place.

Again, thanks so much for this awesome software.

-K

[Bartman]

I have just added hot plug support to the HID plug-in.
Some testing would be appreciated.

[kingtd]

I just tested it with my DiNovo set and it seems to work great.

The way I have my machines set up, they have a Logitech Bluetooth stick connected to a USB port on the monitor. When I switch the monitor off with the power button, it kills the Bluetooth stick as well. This works nicely for me because I can keep a small mouse bump from waking up my monitor/hard drive, and it also makes sure that my bluetooth Motorola SLVR doesn't see my PC as a headset when I'm not going to be using the PC for a while.

The downside was when I powered the monitor back on, EG had a hard time finding the HID keys on my keyboard.
Before you created this fix, I was using this macro that watched for a HID device to be enabled and then I would disable/enable the plugin. It never worked quite right, so hotplug support is a beautiful thing for me. =)

Will this be added to the next beta release?

-K

[Bitmonster]

Will this be added to the next beta release?

-K

As long as Bartman commits its changes into the SVN trunk (and he has), they will automatically be included in the next beta.

[Bartman]

I think I will add the events System.DeviceRemoved and System.DeviceArrived for HID devices. Then you can use eg.Bind("System.DeviceAttached", self.MyCallback) in your __start__ method to get informed and eg.UnBind("System.DeviceAttached", self.MyCallback) in your __stop__ method.

I was just wondering what kind of devices will trigger such events when connected/disconnected?
HID and Storage devices work fine but my USB-UIRT can be unplugged unnoticed.

[Bitmonster]

Yes, only disk devices and HID devices are registered for event generation. You can experiment with more device types in plugins/System/DeviceChangeNotifier.py. For example another call to RegisterDeviceNotification with {a5dcbf10-6530-11d2-901f-00c04fb951ed} should enable USB raw devices.