dcled (hidapi)

Userland driver for Dream Cheeky (Dream Link?) USB LED Message Board.

Copyright 2018 Jahn Fuchs github.jahnf@wolke7.net

While this is orginally a fork of https://github.com/kost/dcled by Jeff Jahr, it ended up with competely different code.

While the original idea was just to make dcled work with HID API and therefore run on my current Ubuntu (and OpenSuse) systems, it became kind of a toy project of mine for C++ and CMake.

Third party

• args (https://github.com/Taywee/args) by Taylor C. Richberger taywee@gmx.com and Pavel Belikov is used for argumen t parsing.

• moodycamel::ConcurrentQueue (https://github.com/cameron314/concurrentqueue) by Cameron Desrochers is used.

• And of course HID API (https://github.com/signal11/hidapi).

Building

Requirements

• C++14 compiler (if gcc, then version 5 or higher)
• CMake 3.8 or later
• libusb when building the default version with hidapi-libusb

How to build:

  > git clone https://github.com/jahnf/dcled-hidapi
  > cd dcled-hidapi
  > mkdir build && cd build
  > cmake ..
  > make

Build options

Besides the default CMake build options, the following is available:

• BUILD_DCLED_HIDAPI_LIBUSB - Build a dcled version with hidapi-libusb, default = ON
• BUILD_DCLED_HIDAPI_RAW - Build a dcled version with hidapi-raw, default = OFF
• BUILD_DCLED_WITHOUT_HIDAPI - Build a dcled version without any hidapi/usb bindings, default = OFF

Either tell CMake the options on the command line or use the CMake convenience tools ccmake or cmake-gui.

Features

While not all features from the original dcled have (yet) been implemented, there are new features available.

• Basically dcled (hidapi) take a list of animations, puts them in the devices queue and it is processed.

• This can be via the command line or via files (with animation lists inside) or a mix of it.

• Even if you don't have a USB Messageboard connected you can show the animations on your (color-enabled) terminal. (-s and -v command line options)

Running

If you want to connect to a Dream Cheeky USB Messageboard, you need to give yourself write acces to this device.

• For this copy the file 40-dcled.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/40-dcled.rules
• Run sudo udevadm control --reload-rules and sudo udevadm trigger to load rules without rebooting.

(Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04)

Other

• See Jeff Jahr's original page: https://www.last-outpost.com/~malakai/dcled/

Roadmap/Ideas

• More animation types
• Support piping
• Support pixmaps in animations
• dcled-server: running as a daemon, offering a REST API?
• Maybe: Support Microsoft Windows builds