Here's were I start to learn stuff, and reveal how little I know so
far. I found nothing in the documentation or Windows software
provided for the Optimus Mini Three keyboard (http://
www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-mini/downloads/) than
mentioned HID.
HID (Human Interface Device). Almost all keyboards, mice, trackballs,
joysticks, game pads, flight simulator hardware, etc, are HID
devices. There's a standardized way for an app to determine the
capabilities of a HID device, and to map them onto app functions.
There is a HID driver built-in to Mac OS X, and that's why you can
use any USB keyboard or mouse without installing special drivers
(there are exceptions, of course).
Looking up that Vendor and Product ID, I see various mentions of
"USB to serial DB-9" and "USB-to-Serial Bridge."
It's disappointing to hear that your keypad is essentially a serial
device, not a USB device.
The software page mentioned above also includes some samples for
developing plug-ins for Windows. I read down into them as far as I
could today, and they seem to be using file I/O to talk to the
keyboard (CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile). For example, the call
to (their internal class) CPort::Open includes the following:
I don't know windows programming, but I'd speculate that they're
opening the virtual serial port, created by the USB-to-serial driver
installed with the product. You typically communicate with a serial
port as if it were a file that you can write to and read from (but
not seek within).
If you're very lucky, there's a driver already for the USB-to-serial
bridge chip they use. I tried to find Prolific's website (http://
www.prolific.com.tw/), but it appears to be down (they appear to use
Microsoft software to serve their website, so I'm not surprised). Try
it again later, maybe you'll get lucky.
Pretty poor of them to choose a USB-serial bridge chip that doesn't
already have a Mac OS X driver.
Once you've got that driver installed, the keypad's documentation
might have enough information on the serial protocol used to
communicate with it.
--
Rick
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