[Kde-hardware-devel] i-Buddy

[Armijn Hemel]

hi all,

for fun I bought an i-Buddy (http://www.i-buddy.com/). It is a rather
stupid toy, with a few LEDs in its head (various colours, can be
combned) and heart (just red), flapping wings and rotating body. It is
connected via USB.

Someone has figured out the protocol:

http://cuntography.com/blog/?p=17

and also has some code there. I want to be able to use it with Kopete
(or Pidgin, but that's a different project, I know), or a Plasmoid.

The only issue with the device is that the device presents itself as a
HID device (according to a post here:
http://www.freelists.org/archives/argyllcms/12-2007/msg00068.html in
between the rant you can see that apparently this is to get around some
driver signing problem). The Linux kernel device thus grabs it.

So the result of this is that the code that is there does not exactly
work, without some tweaks (uncommenting the 'detachKernelDriver' lines).

There are a few solutions. First is of course to get it into the Linux
USBHID code as a 'quirk' and so the kernel driver will ignore it. The
other would be to rework the program to use the proper interfaces the
kernel exposes to the outside world (but I don't know which ones). I am
also not sure how portable this would be (hi Adriaan!).

What would your expert advice be?

armijn

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