[BRLTTY] developing a braille display driver for a mobile device

[Shiri Azenkot]

Thanks for your response, Mario.

I'm developing for the Android platform (runs on the linux kernel). I'm
going to try using BrlAPI as you suggested.

Shiri

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Mario Lang <mlang at delysid.org> wrote:

> Shiri Azenkot <shiri.azenkot at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > I'd like to develop a mobile device application that interacts directly
> with
> > a Braille display via BlueTooth. To do this, I need to know the protocols
> to
> > use with various Braille displays, starting with the HumanWare Brailliant
> > that I have right now. It doesn't look like the protocols are available
> > anywhere, though, and there seem to be no Braille Display API's for
> mobile
> > platforms.
>
> Well, I don't know how limited your platform is, but BrlAPI should still
> be useable.  So you could run BRLTTY and reuse all the bluetooth
> code we've already written, and use libbrlapi to develop your
> application.  That app would then be mostly device independant
> and you'd not need to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
>
> > BRLTTY developers: How did you figure out how to interact with Braille
> > displays?
>
> This really depends on the protocol you're trying to implement,
> and how similar the bluetooth protocol is to existing protocols
> on other connections (serial, USB).  In the case of bluetooth, most
> driver support we've developed simply needed bluetooth specific
> transfer functions.  All the devices I know of use the same
> byte protocol on bluetooth and serial connections.  So since
> we already had the protocol implemented for earier models,
> we were able to reuse that code when implementing bluetooth
> connectivity.
>
> To answer your actual question, in many cases we've been provided
> with manufacturer documentation on direct request, and in
> a few remaining cases reverse engineering was used.  In any case,
> correct driver support for all display types out there
> is a tedious process, if I were you, I'd try to reuse
> BRLTTY's existing code and go via libbrlapi.
>
> --
> CYa,
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