I have some ideas for improvements on my touchpad, ranging from the run of the mill scroll horizontally at the bottom, tapzones for right click, to more complicated ones. But I have no idea where to get started? I'm working on Windows 7 Home Premium, its an Asus laptop, and I have none of these options natively available to me. Regardless, I want to write something that anyone can use.
Where would I start?
(it'd be nice to write in c++? is that possible? what are the requirements here? what language would be recommended?)
This is dependent on the hardware and driver for the touchpad. Just because Windows 7 supports gestures and multitouch doesn't mean that your touchpad does automatically; assuming that the hardware supports it (doubtful), the driver has to be specifically updated to support it as well.
If you have none of the options available natively, you won't automagically get them just by upgrading to Windows 7.
If you plan on writing software that supports gestures or multitouch, you have no real option other than investing in the hardware as well. After all, how will you test your software without it?
Scrolling functionality such as you describe is handled in touchpad drivers, which are hardware specific. However, you may be able to accomplish what you want by using a hook. This is a mechanism by which you intercept and pre-process system messages before they're sent to applications. This could allow you to designate some areas of the touchpad for extra functionality without having to write a driver. But you're probably better off seeing if there is an existing driver with the functionality you want available from the ASUS site. If your laptop didn't come with Windows 7 originally, you're probably just running a generic driver and an actual touchpad specific driver might fix your problem.
Related
In Windows 8/8.1 it's now possible to enable/disable Bluetooth via the OS itself (see image below). This is awesome because it's device/driver-agnostic.
On Android, this is possible via BluetoothAdapter.enable() and BluetoothAdapter.disable(), but I haven't been able to find anything to do this on Windows (even though it seems like it's definitely possible).
So I've tried using:
BluetoothEnableIncomingConnections() - However, this only prevents new incoming connections. It doesn't disable existing ones.
devcon.exe - The problem with this method is that A. it is a non-redistributable binary B. it requires that you know he device ID ahead of time (so it's not device/driver-agnostic). Also, while it's not a dealbreaker, it'd be nice to not require elevation.
UI Automation - Simply launching the PC Settings app and toggling the switch with keyboard events is easy, but it's super ugly, both in terms of proper coding practices and in terms of user experience. That being said, this is the only way I've found to achieve the behavior I'm looking for so far.
I'm writing a native Win32 app in C++, so I'm not constrained to any Windows Store app requirements, although, it would be great if there was an approach that didn't require elevation.
TL;DR
Are there any APIs, WMI interfaces, or anything else available to achieve functionally equivalent results to flipping the Bluetooth toggle switch? If not, are there any alternative methods which yield similar results?
In win8.1 you should be able to call BluetoothEnableRadio to enable/disable the local radio.
Basically the manufacturers should include a method to accomplish this so you don't have to load a dll.
"Beginning with Windows 8.1 vendors are no longer required to implement radio on/off capability (for Bluetooth 4.0 radios) in a software DLL as described in this topic, because the operating system now handles this functionality. Windows 8.1 will ignore any such DLL, even if present."
check out this link which talks about it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh450832%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
I'm trying to find a good GUI library I could use to create a program on the computer that connects to a microcontroller by USB. I've never done any GUI work before but I have done a lot of webpage design/tools. We are going to program the microcontroller with C but I don't think the GUI will need to be C. It needs to work on Windows, so probably compile on Windows too. I've also never done any USB transmission but I'm hoping to take it one step at a time.
Right now I'm looking at using GTK but it needs a bunch of other things to download with it. I'm also going to look at QT and someone else suggested making a Windows Forms Application. There's a lot of options out there so I'm having trouble figuring it out.
As for my requirement, it just needs to be a very simple GUI that has a few control buttons, a display area (info from microcontroller), a notification area (basically error messages go here), and maybe a graph. I've included a prototype GUI help give you an idea of what I'm doing.
Edit: It needs to run and compile on Windows. We don't really have a budget for it, free open source is preferred. I don't need something elaborate and fancy, I just want to get it done as fast as possible.
We are using a TTL-232R cable, UART interface. I know nothing about USB transmission, school has crushed me.
From what you've specified, I would set base-camp up at Java.
Java in Eclipse to write the code.
Java Swing libraries (helped by the WindowBuilder plugin for Eclipse) to "draw" the GUI. It is very easy to create "Windowsy" GUIs using these.
JFreeGraph libaries to allow you to create graphs very easily, again from within Eclipse.
RXTX library for "virtual COM port" serial communication within Java (it doesn't sound like you're using proper USB, but just RS232 with a USB adapter).
Your created GUI would run on any machine with Java installed, which is not a big ask for the end user. You can even create a Windows executable/installer from the resulting Java files if you wanted it to be a (apparently) native Windows application.
And - bonus - all the tools mentioned are free as a bird.
It will kind of depend on what kind of compiler, IDE, etc you will settle on. If you are going to windows cold, and
money is an issue, then open source is always a good thing to look at. I have enjoyed using eclipse and Code::Blocks IDEs. For C/C++, I use minGW. In terms of GUI plug-ins, HERE are some conversation with GUI recommendations specifically for use with Code::Blocks.
If money is not an issue, I have use National Instruments LabWindows/CVI full dev kit forever. It is one of the easiest ANSI C compilers/IDE I have ever used. It is only ANSI C, but has extensions to make using instrumentation easy. I have written a little USB stuff (not much), sockets, instrumentation, and many GUI apps.
Please comment what tools you currently prefer, I may have other suggestions.
Lazarus CodeTyphon has cross platform native compiler with GUI working on every supported platform. It supports 8 OS-CPU host layers (Win32, Win64, Linux32, Linux64, FreeBSD32, FreeBSD64, Solaris32 and Solaris64), and 25+ OS-CPU target layers. It also incorporates many graphical widgets and SCADA like behaviour with PascalSCADA and other components. There are wrappers for LibUSB.
I would use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop the GUI. They offer a free version called Express. I would use the C# language but MSVS supports other languages as well so just choose whichever you're most comfortable with. The best thing about MSVS is that there are millions of developers out there, which means that you will be able to search for and find lots of examples for how to use an RS-232 COM port or USB interface. I'm guessing that you'll be able to find GUI objects for graphing and other objects as well. (The basic stuff like buttons and edit boxes is all built into MSVS.)
BTW, you need to sort out whether you're using an RS-232 COM port or a USB interface. They're both serial interfaces but they're not the same thing. Either could work.
I'm trying to implement an AVRCP/A2DP connection between my Android phone and my car PC. The A2DP bit basically works out of the box so no issue there. I want the PC to be the AVRCP CT (controller) and the A2DP sink. The phone is the AVRCP TG (target) and the A2DP source.
Where I'm having trouble is getting any sort of AVRCP connection that I can use. Windows 7 comes with a toolbar application that at least provides the basic play/pause/skip/stop type functions. So it definitely works with the software I have without any extra drivers or otherwise. However my searching has produced little results on any way to do this or documentation on creating an L2CAP connection which I believe I need.
The 32feet.NET libraries don't support L2CAP connections unless you use a Broadcom/Widcomm stack. Buying a new BT USB device may be a viable solution but at the moment I'm trying to do this all in software :). i.e. like this although there a problems noted there that weren't solve (or reported as solved)
link: How can I establish an AVRCP connection from Windows 7 (controller) to phone (target) using L2CAP on Widcomm SDK?
I'd prefer to do it C# if possible but if I had some kind of library to interface with my code, that would be fine (like the 32feet.NET library which works quite well for the things it does work on.)
This is about the closest I've got but is all a bit Greek to me and not quite enough to get me started (I'm an embedded guy):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff536674(v=vs.85).aspx
Is Bluetooth really such a mess on Windows that it seems to be from my searching? There are multiple different stacks that all seem to be significantly different in terms of the API etc.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've done a lot of searching/reading other posts here and elsewhere and not really made any progress.
Thanks
Christian
My application needs to behave as a virtual joystick (imagine dragging a square with the mouse and translating that to the output of an analog joystick) and send some keystrokes over the network to another computer where the driver would receive that input.
I only need to support XP, Vista and Win7.
Maybe it can be done without writing a driver. I tried sending keystrokes with SendKey() which seemed to work but don't know how to emulate an analog joystick.
I've downloaded the VDK and been reading everything I can find on the subject but there are lots of things I still don't understand. Can you please point me in the right direction?
Should I build a kernel-mode or user-mode driver?
Can my driver act as a server for an app on the network?
Do you know good tutorials / books / samples that can help me with this.
Thanks
First of all you will have to have some kind of interface between your computer (or the network) and the joystick device that is being controlled.
If it involves making custom hardware to control the analog joystick (like it controls pneumatics or hydraulics or something, not just a pc game joystick type thing), then yes, you will almost certainly need a driver to allow a network app to move (the robot arm, or whatever) will move that joystick.
If you are able to remove the physical joystick from the equation, maybe you can write software that emulates the input of wherever the joystick used to plug into (a joystick/serial port?), or emulates it completely (a reasonably simple driver could do this). You could do it completely without writing a driver if the joystick used a standard communication interface (like RS232) because libraries exist that will handle all that and you can set up virtual COM ports that will be indistinguishable to whatever you are trying to communicate with.
The best book you can buy on driver development at the moment is Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation
Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel is another great book, but doesn't cover a lot of the newer WDF stuff. It has more of a security focus but has a few awesome chapters on device drivers with fully spoonfed examples, breaking it down in a really accessible way.
If it is only over the network, probably simple socket programming should be enough.
I'm looking at developing a device which will need to support Ethernet over USB (hosted in Linux, XP, and Vista). As I understand it, Vista and Linux support the industry standard USB CDC. However, in classic Windows style, XP only supports it's own Remote NDIS. So, now I'm thinking of just bowing down and doing it over RNDIS, as opposed to rolling my own CDC driver for XP.
I've been reading some older documentation that says even XP is pretty buggy with NDIS (suprise!). Does anyone have experience with XP's RNDIS drivers? Are they safe for product development? Any insight would be much appreciated.
We use RNDIS at work. and I've found that it blue screens my machine every now and again (about every month or two). However others (at my work) have not had this happen, so it could just be the particular device that I use.
I think it is stable enough for development, so give it a go.
The problem here is that Linux does not support RNDIS in the host mode, and you can't develop custom driver due to MS RNDIS license restrictions. MAC does not support RNDIS as well due to same reason (licensing).
So if you need multiplatform solution you need a standard approach which is CDC/ECM.
There is number of available CDC/ECM XP/VIsta solutions in the market,you can google for them i don't want to advertise our solution here :)
After doing my own research and testing, a single NDIS device works reasonably well. However, if you are at all needing to support multiple NDIS devices, you are out of luck. My system became extremely unstable and was essentially unusable. This was very reproducible.
I would not recommend NDIS in any type of multiple-device scenario.
if you are looking for commercial solution, Jungo does provide decent ECM solutions works for Windows/Linux/Mac. The only problem is that you have to pay them non-trivial royalty fee if you are going for a mass volume product.