On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Petter Lindquist wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> Has anyone been using the C-pen 10 together with netbsd?
> My hope is that it attaches as an USB keyboard and just inputs text that
> way.

Unfortunately, CPen-10 is a tad too lightweight to function this way.
It doesn't attach as a regular USB HID device and just sends text; it
blasts images over the cable, and apart from requiring a custom USB
driver that understands this image flow protocol, you also need special
software on the host machine. Notably a good OCR engine and the software
required to massage the image flow into its input format and then inject
the output into the computers keyboard input stream, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, this host software currently isn't available for anything
closer to *IX than the soon to come MacOS-X release. While it would
probably be quite easy to port the CPen-10 USB driver, there are currently
no plans to develop the rest of the software for *IX systems.

As one of the OS engineers at C Technologies, I am continuously lobbying
for better support for "Free UNIX(tm)-like Operating Systems", but some
things are beyond my control. Especially if they cost lots of money. ;-)

I have been playing with the thought of trying to port other, more easily
ported stuff for CPen 600 and 800 to NetBSD in my spare time, so this
seems like a good time to ask around -- are there any CPen users out there
who might benefit from it to start with? I can't promise anything (it may
turn out to require substantial work, as there's no(?) IrDA support in
NetBSD) but I'd be interested to know if there's any interest...

-- 
/ali
:wq