I apologize for the naivety of this question, I've some programming experience, but none writing drivers.
We have an older HP DesignJet 5000ps plotter. The only Windows 7 driver we were able to find for it is in Chinese... which works ok until we need to change the settings (there was an employee who spoke Mandarin, but he/she left).
I'm assuming, for the driver to work with windows properly, the source code is in English and simply the user interface is in Mandarin, so if I could access it, it would be a matter of changing the output for the various display options.
Thank you for your time.
It looks like the following link has the English driver you are looking for:
http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=58144
You can choose the language and the operating system version from the dropdown menus. If you have a newer Windows, you can run the software with XP compatibility settings if there are any problems.
Related
Scenario:
I have an usb-RFID reader
attaching it to notebook it works as an newly attached USB keyboard, e.g. without needing to install any drivers
when touching the reader with RFID tag
it enters into my current window (for example terminal/shell) the RFID number (like 0009339384\n) - e.g. it even sends the \n.
so, it works exactly as if I had typed the numbers in my notebook's keyboard
The questions are:
is it possible read the RFID reader directly without some kernel-level drivers, e.g. something like cat /dev/keyboard1 ...
in other words, how can I determine from which "keyboard" the characters are coming?
using OS X, but would be nice to know the solution for Linux too.
Moreover, I want attach two readers - so I definitely need to clearly differentiate between the two readers. And I want use the rfid-reader in a bash (perl) script, so I'm definitely looking for a solution without compiling some "drivers"... It is possible?
The OS X identifies it as:
SYC ID&IC USB Reader:
Product ID: 0x0035
Vendor ID: 0xffff
Version: 1.00
Serial Number: 08FF20140315
Speed: Up to 1.5 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Sycreader RFID Technology Co., Ltd
Location ID: 0x14100000 / 18
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 100
Extra Operating Current (mA): 0
EDIT Okay, looks like in Linux it can be done - just found
this https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/72483/how-to-distinguish-input-from-different-keyboards
also Accessing multiple keyboards input by C++ (or python) in linux
For OS X - exact duplicate on unix: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228413/route-keyboard-through-only-dev-ttys000-on-mac-os-x - unfortunately, closed without any answer :(
Ok, so - easily solvable in Linux. As in edits in the question - here are already many similar questions like this.
The solution is: reading the particular /dev/input/eventN device(s).
In my case, me using the Linux::Input perl module. Works perfectly.
It is pointless adding code here, the package comes with the evtest.pl - so anyone could easily check how it works.
Still need solve one issue - e.g. even when reading the device and nicely getting all events from the rfid reader (4 events for one number), the rfid-code still is inserted into the active window, like it coming from a keyboard. (This will be an another question).
For OS X i haven't an easy solution yet, but now focusing for the Linux variant. :)
There is one thing that might help you solve this problem without resorting to programming in C. It is called multiseat. I didn't do it myself I just know it exists. In general it is a way how multiple people can work on same computer at the same time just using multiple keyboards, mice and monitors. It is not exactly what you are looking for but there might be possible way.
Running an up-to-date Gentoo on my Sager NP8298 (Clevo P177SM-A), and I am heartbreakingly close to having all of my hardware running beautifully. I found a nice open source driver to run my keyboard backlight at this GitHub repo, but the problem was it was made for a Clevo chassis that didn't have the touchpad light that mine does. Kinda tacky, I know, but the problem is that the default color for the touchpad light is blue, and can be kind of distracting when the keyboard is set to a different color.
I'd at least like to be able to turn the light off, if not control its color. I have a Windows install and am able to access the proprietary driver that came with the computer. I just don't quite know where to start on trying to modify this driver, if there were some Windows utilities that I could use to see what the driver is doing and how to access the LED programatically, it would be a huge help. Any ideas?
Other functionality that I'd like to add is Fn+Num pad 7 through 9 for toggling the left, center, and right part of the keyboard individually, and Fn+5 for a num pad light toggle, as the Windows driver does. I just need to know what signals need to be sent to the hardware and how to send them.
Whatever I end up with I'll be sure to fork the project and share the results with other users of this hardware.
You need the source code of driver you want to change. With that and all required bits and bobs (a.k.a. dependences) you can change it to do whatever you want.
That said, there are quite a few things to consider. You need to know, at least at a reasonable level, the language used to build the driver, platform dependencies if any.
I've done similar work for some network drivers like 15 years ago and no it's not a fun job.
I'm currently working on a platform with WinCE 6.0 R3 Compact Framework.
I change the settings in the register to different culture and different language layouts.
This works for the text, time, date, etc.
But when I connect a USB hardware keyboard only three languages are supported:
USA, Korea, and Japan.
I want some other languages as well like Finish, Swedish, Germany, etc.
Guess I need drivers? How do I solve this? Feels like I'm not the first one going down this path.
You'll need to update the keyboard driver's key map to include the other keyboards. I had to do this probably a decade ago for Finnish on CE 5.0, so I don't recall all of the details but I do know it was a simple change to the layout map and it took very little actual time to fix. It did, however, require a recompile of the driver and the OS. MSDN has pointers to the drive location for where the current layouts, etc. are.
I followed this guide and think it worked out:
http://ethanchen1108.pixnet.net/blog/post/6143102-%E2%97%8E-create-french-keyboard-layout-for-windows-ce
I'm trying to write an application that categorizes a certain type of file, music for example, or pictures. As part of the application users would be able to tag items so as to make searching more efficient. These tags could be location and place of a picture, or it could be the camera it was taken with, or even the emotion that a person feels when looking at the picture.
I can foresee that this information would be very useful to the operating system for it's desktop wide searches. That way users would not have to open my application to search for content based on the tags they provide.
I'd like to know what technologies are native to different operating systems/desktop environments. I know of (meta?)tracker for Gnome, and I'd be interested in hearing about equivalent for KDE, Windows and Mac OSX.
For KDE I can point out:
digiKam for images management
amaroK for music
I think they both do what you want. However, I'm not quite sure what is the scope of your question: are you just looking for existing tool for tagging/rating images/music?
Well, this question has been out for a while and I've done research since I asked this question, and here is what I've found.
For KDE there is a component called Strigi, which is required by plasma, and this provides the file tagging and search functionalities along with something called Nepomuk.
Gnome has tracker, which does the same thing, and seems to be a component of the Gnome desktop.
Windows has tagging, but I haven't found out how one can programmatically access the tags on the files, or how generic they are. However it is only possible to tag certain file types, so txt files for example can not be tagged.
As a programmer I have no idea how one would go about programming menus for a DVD, I have heard that this is possible, and even seen basic games using DVD menus - although it may very well be a closed-system. Is it even possible and if so, what language, compilers etc exist for this?
There are a couple of open source projects that can create DVDs plus menus. I recently used dvd-slideshow to create a simple dvd with menus etc. Another one is DVD Styler. All of these programs are basically a front-end for various command-line tools for encoding, menu creation etc. Since these are open source projects you can have a look at the source and check out how they accomplish this.
The DVD menus that appear on a typical movie DVD are described in the DVD-Video standard: wikipedia.
If you are trying to create this type of menu, there are many programs that will create these. I have had luck with DVD Styler.
If you are creating an application that is distributed on a DVD, the choice of programming language is up to you. I suppose you could use some sort of OS auto-start feature to run an application that would bring up a menu for the user.
The WIKI States (in 2011) "
Programming interfaceA virtual machine implemented by the DVD player runs 'bytecode' contained on the DVD. This is used to control playback and display special effects on the menus. The instruction set is called the Virtual Machine (VM) DVD command set. There are 16 general parameter registers (GPRM) to hold temporary values and 24 system parameters (SPRM). As a result of a moderately flexible programming interface, DVD players can be used to play games, such as the DVD re-release of Dragon's Lair, along with more sophisticated and advanced games such as Scene It, all of which can be run on standard DVD players.
Looks like http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/ is able to help here since you can use command line interface and feed xml files.
You may need to write a framework which can generate xml files (and other content) from your game authoring tool.