Hello everyone,

I want to make a simple device, which is just a button (or possibly several ones), and i want to be able to get the state of these buttons (down-up) in my C++ application, problem is, i have never done such thing before (or lets say, i have never tried to use hardware with my apps)

So i suppose it should be something like this: the device should have a usb cable, and i need to write a driver for it, and the driver sends info to my application

my questions are:
1- how to create the driver?
2- after creation, how do the driver communicate with my application?

I' be really thankful if someone coul point me in the right direction, as i dont even know where to start

using windows 7 32-bit
the only language i know is C++, so i hope i dont need to learn another in order to do this

regards
-Hassan

The absolute easiest way to do this would be to buy a cheap USB gamepad, tear it apart, and attach your buttons to the existing push-button contacts on the PCB. Then you could use the standard XInput interface to read input from it like any other gamepad.

Quote:Original post by Sneftel
The absolute easiest way to do this would be to buy a cheap USB gamepad, tear it apart, and attach your buttons to the existing push-button contacts on the PCB. Then you could use the standard XInput interface to read input from it like any other gamepad.

That won't work with XInput, XInput is for Xbox360 (and -alike) controllers only.
For normal gamepads, you could use DirectInput or winmm.
But yeah, that would be the easiest way I could think of. You can get a usb gamepad for less than 5 bucks nowadays.

thanks for the replies everyone

The problem is that i need multiple buttons, lets say i bought 3 gamepads and i teared it apart and made it look like a button, and i plugged all 3 gamepads to my pc, pressing it will send the info to directinput, but the application will not know which pad sent it (which is essential for my project)

so i thought i could try creating my own device which has 3 buttons (buttons are not close to each other, there should be a wire connecting each one to the device), an it sends each button's id and state to the computer through the usb port, the problem is that i dont know how to make the hardware nor the software, hardware might not be a big problem as i know some engineers, but creating a driver looks like a pain (realized this from reading the replies)

Luctus, could you give me some more information about this? how to pass the device address? in lpFileName? how can i get that from SetupDiEnumDeviceInterfaces?
And what will actually happen? the handle i will have is a handle to a file which contains information about the device? do the device have to have some specific configurations to write to that file?

Even though i really want to learn about how to use hardware with my apps, yet i only need the buttons thing (mentioned above), thus if you find an easy solution for it (i mean for being able to detect the sender of the button press message), i would be thankful if you could let me know about it.

regards
-Hassan

Quote:Original post by Hassanbasil
The problem is that i need multiple buttons, lets say i bought 3 gamepads and i teared it apart and made it look like a button, and i plugged all 3 gamepads to my pc, pressing it will send the info to directinput, but the application will not know which pad sent it (which is essential for my project)

Why wouldn't it? It's not like games can't tell what input is coming from which gamepad. You just check each gamepad in turn. It does seem wasteful, though, why not have three buttons coming off the one gamepad?

@Luctus: Oh i didn't look deeply in it, that's great! thanks for the link! so, all i need is a vendor id and a product id? Well well, do you, by any chance, know a guide to create a device (hardware) and give it the ID's? or know a place (forum) to ask such question(s)?

thanks once again that was really helpful!


@Sneftel: i havn't really used directinput before as everyone says that it's bad compared to windows api input (through the windproc)(unless you want to get a joysttick's info), i thought it's just like GetAsyncKeyState api function, call some function/method to check if key x is pressed, anyway it seems to work in a different way

if i wont be able to create my own device, i will try to do this, it seems the simplest

"why not have three buttons coming off the one gamepad?"
well because each button should be in a different room or a different desk, connected (wire or wireless, depends on how it goes) to one PC