[fpc-pascal] USB Human Interface Devices

[James Richters]

I wonder if HID devices will work at all on Windows the same as they do on Linux.   I have not been able to get the HID part of the python code to work on windows yet either because the instructions given to install the packages needed only apply to Linux...   I also wonder if fundamental differences in operating systems is why FPC doesn't already have built in support for HID devices... maybe it's just not possible to make it cross platform.

I did a little searching... I came across this:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/hid/introduction-to-hid-concepts

it seems maybe you are right and even though I did not install a driver into windows for this device, maybe windows just detected it was an HID device and attached it, and what I really need to do is access it through windows, not directly.. I had to do this with parallel ports.. I can't just read and write directly to the parallel port like I used to be able to with DOS,  I have to go through windows somehow.. I am using http://www.highrez.co.uk/Downloads/InpOut32/ to work with parallel ports with Windows.  I think it's a DLL written in C, so I had to write a unit to get it to work with FPC... but it does work reliably even though windows shows the ports in device manager.  Microsoft seems to be completely against users accessing hardware directly as we used to be able to with DOS. 

I wonder if the only way to get FPC to work with HID devices on Windows is to do something similar with the windows HID API, and go through windows the only way windows will allow me to access these devices.  I've been searching trying to find information on this.. I came across the project at:

https://github.com/signal11/hidapi

it states in the readme:

HIDAPI has four back-ends:
	* Windows (using hid.dll)
	* Linux/hidraw (using the Kernel's hidraw driver)
	* Linux/libusb (using libusb-1.0)
	* FreeBSD (using libusb-1.0)
	* Mac (using IOHidManager)

This seems to indicate the libusb-1.0 is what you use for Linux and FreeBSD, but not for windows, because if it worked for Windows or Mac, then why bother doing it differently for them.  Of course this project is for C, not pascal.... 

So then I was looking for a Pascal way to use hid.dll, and came across this:
https://github.com/prof7bit/HIDAPI.pas/blob/master/hidapi.pas  that looked promising because it has functions like Open(), Close(), Write(), Read(), SendFeatureReport() etc... but.... that isn't working under windows... uggggggg.  

It seems that using this HID device with FPC under windows is going to be anything but easy... ugggg   maybe I can solve it with hardware.. I can get a raspberry pi, teach my self python, hack the python code to interface with the HID device on the Rpi and communicate with my windows 10 FPC program over an ethernet port or something stupid like that and hope it's fast enough... boy is sure seems stupid to use another complete computer to interface this once device to windows... I guess I'll keep trying to come up with a solution.

Anyone have any thoughts on all this?

James