aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/drivers/staging/frontier/README
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'drivers/staging/frontier/README')
-rw-r--r--drivers/staging/frontier/README28
1 files changed, 28 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/drivers/staging/frontier/README b/drivers/staging/frontier/README
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..07c9ef9b8fc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/drivers/staging/frontier/README
@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
1This directory contains the USB Tranzport and Alphatrack Kernel drivers for Linux.
2
3At present the tranzport does reads/writes of 8 byte cmds to /dev/tranzport0 to control
4the lights and screen and wheel
5
6At present the alphatrack accepts reads/writes of 12 byte cmds to /dev/tranzport0 to control
7the lights and screen and fader.
8
9Both drivers also have some sysfs hooks that are non-functional at the moment.
10
11The API is currently closely tied to the ardour revision and WILL change.
12
13A sysfs interface is PERFECT for simple userspace apps to do fun things with the
14lights and screen. It's fairly lousy for handling input events and very lousy
15for watching the state of the shuttle wheel.
16
17A linux input events interface is great for the input events and shuttle wheel. It's
18theoretically OK on LEDs. A Fader can be mapped to an absolute mouse device.
19But there is no LCD support at all.
20
21In the end this is going to be driven by a midi layer, which handles all those
22cases via a defined API, but - among other things - is slow, doesn't do
23flow control, and is a LOT of extra work. Frankly, I'd like to keep the
24core driver simple because the only realtime work really required is
25the bottom half interrupt handler and the output overlapping.
26
27Exposing some sort of clean aio api to userspace would be perfect. What that
28API looks like? Gah. beats me.