Re: Twiddler2 & Poma Work Togeth

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

On 7/8/06, Ben Roose <> wrote:
> Ok, I've been doing some experimenting with the Poma today.
>
>    I had a USB to dual PS/2 adapter lying around and tried it on the Poma
> with a PS/2 keyboard and mouse.  I assume it is passive as it looks small
> and I got it from eBay for a few dollars when I was working on a Compaq IA-1
> a while back.

If it's dual, I doubt it's passive. Passive ones just have metal and
plastic. They just change the shape of the conductors so that the pins
on the PS/2 device can make contact with the pins on the USB jack.

If it's passive there will be no device detected if there is no device
plugged in to the adaptor. Since there are no electronics inside the
passive adapter for the PC to recognize.

So here's one way to check: I don't know if you can do this on the
POMA, but in Windows I would look at the device manager, and look at
"devices by connection" in the device manager. Expand out the USB
stuff with the adaptor unplugged. Then plug it in and see what get's
added. This took a bit of trial and error for me.

I'm guessing you'll see a new little tree somewhat like this:

USB Composite Device
-USB Human Interface Device
 -HID Keyboard Device
-USB Human Interface Device
 -HID Compliant Consumer Control Device
 -HID-Compliant device
 -HID-compliant mouse

So you can see there are two devices in the one composite device, a
keyboard and a mouse. And you'll see this whether or not any real
keyboards and/or mice are actually plugged in to the adapter.

>    The PS/2 keyboard worked fine, no problem.  I even got the PS/2 keyboard
> and a USB trackball working at the same time by use of a USB hub.  However,
> a PS/2 mouse does not work with the adapter - neither with the keyboard,
> with the USB Trackball, nor on its own.

I'm guessing then, that the WinCE drivers with the POMA only handle
the keyboard portion of the composite device. Unfortunately I don't
know of any PS/2 to USB adapters that only show up as a mouse device
only.

>    So, by what I can figure out - the Poma/WinCE 3.0 has a basic USB mouse
> driver and a PS/2 keyboard driver but no PS/2 mouse driver (and for some
> reason the USB mouse driver does not work with a PS/2 mouse on an adapter,
> at least not with my adapter).

I don't think that's it, see what I said above.

>    I think this is why the posts I found in the archive said that only the
> PS/2 Twiddler 2 keyboard worked and not the mouse.  If only there was a
> twiddler2 with a PS/2 keyboard and a USB mouse.
>    I've a feeling I'm going to have to go down the route of getting a PS/2
> Twiddler2 and just live with the fact that I'll be using an extra mouse (and
> all the extra cables) with it.

That, or maybe you could write or find a driver for the POMA that will
work with the composite device. Or try to find an adapter the shows up
as only a mouse and not a composite device.

>    Craig, you asked for a link to the Wear Hard Archive posts regarding
> using the Twiddler2 on a Poma, I just did a search in the archive for "Poma"
> and came up with four pages of listings including:
>
> http://wearables.blu.org/wear-hard-02/20027314.html

Thanks, I'll take a look later hopefully.

--
Craig

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