[libhid-discuss] libhid + swig -> c#

Xiaofan Chen xiaofanc at gmail.com
Sat Apr 9 23:54:20 UTC 2011


On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 6:56 AM, Charles Lepple <clepple at ghz.cc> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 2011, at 1:25 PM, Rudolf Muehlbauer wrote:
>> I am wondering what the current status of libhid is. Is it still
>> maintained, used? The last svn commit was back in 2008.
>
> I have been recommending that people consider HIDAPI instead. It seems to be
> much better at the cross-platform goal than libhid, since libusb isn't
> always the best solution. (On the other hand, I haven't tried HIDAPI myself.
> Maybe someone else on the list has.)

I tried HIDAPI a bit and it is quite good. On the other hand, it does
not have enough bindings and the packaging of it is not that great.
It has great potentials though.
http://www.signal11.us/oss/hidapi/

>> I am interested to use it in a project written with Mono/C#. Is it much
>> of a hassle to generate the C# bindings?
>
> It would certainly be a to me, since I don't know C#. If you have used SWIG
> before, I imagine it would not be that difficult. I suspect the biggest
> hurdle would be wrapping libusb for use in C#.

Travis Robinson (current developers of libusb-win32) is also the developer
of libusbdotnet, a great C# bindings for libusb. It works under Linux
and Mac OS X with Mono, but only with libusb-1.0. For Windows, it
works with libusb-1.0, WinUSB and libusb-win32.
http://libusbdotnet.sourceforge.net/V2/Index.html

> Actually, if you don't need the hidparser library (i.e. you know the report
> structures), there is not much to libhid. Look at the source for the
> functions which you would use - they are mostly error-checking.
>


-- 
Xiaofan



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