accessing a USB HID

[Serge Orlov]

jodansmif at gmail.com wrote:
> I've been teaching myself Python as part of my senior design project at
> university.
>
> The obstacle our group currently faces is communicating with a
> microcontroller (ACS USB Servo II) that appears in Windows as a USD
> HID. Unfortunately, the vendor's sample code is in Visual Basic and
> Visual C++ which none of our group members have any experience using.
>
> My hope is that someone has experience with this type of problem and
> can point me to some reference material. At this point I'm a bit lost
> in the morass of USB terminology.
>
> While I'm at it... if anyone knows of a better way to approach this
> problem (serial or parallel microcontroller) or another language with
> better tools, I'd appreciate that as well. We're just trying to turn
> several motors on and off while polling some photodiodes and all this
> HID business seems like unnessary overkill.

After cursory look at the device home page it appears the vendor is
providing an Active X control. So it looks like you will need to learn
client side COM programming no matter what language you choose. For
Python you will need win32 extensions:
http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/Downloads.html
or you can use ActivePython distribution that comes integrated with it.

Don't be scared by USB HID, it's just a mandatory classification of the
device under Windows, you don't need to deal with it. Python and COM
don't look scary:
http://www.python.org/windows/win32com/QuickStartClientCom.html

  -- Serge.