Time for what I do best, more project updates!
First off, after 3 years of brokenness, liblightstone may see full stability for multiple devices in upcoming v1.5.
The lightstone is a USB device that comes with the "Journey to Wild Divine" video game. The point of the game is to teach users to relax and breath deeply. However, with the game itself working sporatically thanks to being based on a very old version of Director, actually finding peace with WD rarely happens.
liblightstone was established in 2006 to help owners of the lightstone access data from the device in an open source, cross platform way. However, it has been plagued with bugs when trying to use multiple devices on the same machine, and the release of an updated lightstone with different USB VID/PID pairs caused problems. After finally obtaining one of the newer lightstones last week, I've fixed the aforementioned problems and hope to release v1.5 soon. I hope these will make the driver stable enough to call the hardware access project done for the foreseeable future.
v1.5 will hopefully be released in the next couple of days, after I do some testing across windows machines. I've been getting odd differences in device enumeration between machines with the WDK installed versus without.
The USB access code from liblightstone is also used in projects like libomron and emokit, so these bugfixes will be finding their way to other projects soon.
libomron is also going to be seeing some work soon as we try to continue it toward v1.0.
libomron is a driver for Omron based USB devices, such as the
- HJ-720ITC Pedometer
- HEM-790-IT Blood Pressure Monitor
It currently only covers those two pieces of hardware, as well as their foreign counterparts (like the M10-IT blood pressure monitor). However, it looks like most of Omron's equipment uses the same protocol, so the base of the library is extensible to new equipment as it comes out.
While the omron equipment isn't as flashy as, say, the fitbit, it's far cheaper ($20 for omron's USB pedometer if you find it on sale, versus $99 for a fitbit).
libomron is currently approaching v1.0, with a few things left to be done in order to get multiple devices working (same issue as liblightstone had), as well as getting device clearing working. Finally, we're hoping to have a simple XML/JSON/CSV data exporter available so it can be easily run by other programs with no need for interfacing at the source level, unless you want neat progress bars or something. Everyone loves neat progress bars.