The Next Generation Hempstick Prototype

 


That is a screenshot of USB Probe on my iMac, showing the Hemptsick USB descriptor... 3 axes, 64 buttons. But it can contain whatever combo you want.

It is a live USB device, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W Linux device, costing USD $15 + a microSD card. It's a 4 core ARM64, 1GHz device. It's a full computer. 

The deal, eventually, is... you download a .img file, that is a full Linux OS. Then, you burn it to a microSD card of your choice, with a program like Raspberry Pi Imager. Plug in the microSD card into a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W stick... boot up, and plug in the USB cable to the Zero 2W, and the other end to your gaming rig (iMac, in this test)... and it boots up and shows up on my iMac as a USB joystick.

Inside the .img, there are the following, at the moment.

  1. a Custom compiled Linux Kernel, v.6.16.3 to be exact, with the RealTime feature turned on,
  2. a program, tentatively called hempstick-hid-import,
  3. a config file, tentatively called hempstick-hid.conf,
  4. a systemd unit file to automatically run the hempstick-hid-import at startup.
  5. the config.txt and cmdline.txt for OS boot up to load up the right kernel modules and parameters to tell the kernel to run in USB device (gadget in Linux parlance) mode.
You get to swap out the hempstick-hid.conf to make it whatever USB device (not limited to HiD device) you want. For instance, change the PID/VID, or the entire USB HiD report.

One RPi Zero 2W can have only one USB device. But since they are dirt cheap, you get to have many of them.

I still have to write the sensor reading programs, and send the USB reports. Obviously, this "feeder" program will have to match the Hempstick-hid.conf USB descriptor loaded by the systemd. This feeder "daemon" will eventually have its own systemd unit file to automatically start at boot.




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