Rar. Beware. I've now got the M&S USB missile launcher working under Linux. I hate libusb, it's very badly documented and seems to assume you know the USB spec inside out. Anyway, usblauncher-0.0.1.tar.gz does the appropriate magic (if crudely) and includes a basic GTK2 Perl program to control it.
Ian Jeffrey has also produced some code that works in much the same way, but it's only a command line example and I couldn't see a license that allowed redistribution attached to it. It looks like he went about things in much the same way as I did though.
Good to know your study is well-defended.
Making HID back away from the device on Linux, sometime after you've opened the device via usb_open(): usb_detach_kernel_driver_np(launcher, 0); usb_detach_kernel_driver_np(launcher, 1);
Thanks for the thought - like Ian Jeffrey's submission, yours also uses libusb in ctlmissile. Unfortunately, the Mac doesn't like libusb as it prefers (quite strongly) that you use the IOKit drivers etc that work with the mach kernel supplied. Now I could have brain-damaged the kernel and tried to force the Mac to use libusb, but that's a step too far for a USB device that's effectively a toy. And it's making a *big* assumption about what Apple have done to the rest of the kernel: while Apple have based OS X on Linux, theirs is an extremely idiosyncratic implementation! So I decided to go with what they've done and produced a carbon app to drive the launcher in the way the rest of Mac OS X clearly prefers.
Since writing my last comment, a kind soul pointed out that a Darwin (MacOS) port for libusb now exists. It's written using IOKit for 10.2 and up which means no mucking about with removing and/or replacing kext modules in the kernel. Hurrah. Just 6 months too late for me... Best wishes for the wedding!
Since writing my last comment, a kind soul pointed out that a Darwin (MacOS) port for libusb now exists. It's written using IOKit for 10.2 and up which means no mucking about with removing and/or replacing kext modules in the kernel. Hurrah. Just 6 months too late for me... Best wishes for the wedding!