[Discferret] Discferret questions

[Philip Pemberton]

On 31/12/10 23:44, David Griffith wrote:
> Some more questions that I don't see the answers to on your page:
>
> 1) How does the Discferret present itself to the operating system? A
> mass-storage device?

As a USB Vendor Class device. This translates as:
   A device using a vendor-defined communications protocol not covered 
by an applicable USB-IF standard.

The entire control protocol is open, but not documented yet. I'd argue 
that unless you've got a really good reason not to, you're better off 
using the reference API implementation (libdiscferret).

> 2) How does the user control the various aspects of the Discferret, like
> what format to use, side to use, which drive to use, etc?

You use the libdiscferret user-space API. On Linux, this doesn't require 
any kernel drivers be installed, though you will need LibUSB 1.0 (which 
is included in almost all recent Linux distributions). On Windows 32- 
and 64-bit, you need to install a driver called "libusb0" which grants 
LibUSB access to the device.

There's a libusb-1.0 port for Darwin (Mac OS X) too, though I'm not sure 
about other OSes. Libusb-0.1 has wider cross platform support, though 
it's classed as "legacy, deprecated" and as such I'm not too keen on the 
idea of using it.

However, I'm still fairly early on in the development of the 
libdiscferret library, so it could be ported to libusb-0.1 if necessary. 
The only OSes unsupported by libusb-1.0 are FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD 
-- does anyone here need BSD support?

Thanks,
-- 
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/