[Pythonmac-SIG] Zope py2app, some progress

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 10, 2005, at 1:36 AM, Roger Binns wrote:

>> In your presentation
>
> BTW I only got a Mac (mini) a few weeks ago, so all my information
> was based on what other people contributed.

Obviously not people familiar with http://developer.apple.com/ :)

>> you say that serial devices on the Mac are in /dev  with "no other 
>> information".  That is totally not true, unless you say  "no other 
>> information available from POSIX"  ;)  You can get at any  metadata 
>> you want to know about any hardware device in the system (and  
>> plug/unplug notifications) from IOKit.
>
> The specific information I need is USB vendor and product ids and 
> interface
> number on the USB device that correspond to a particular /dev entry.  
> (These are all cell phones exposed by direct USB connections or USB to 
> serial convertors).  The actual devices will show up as serial ports 
> or as modems depending on the interface protocol class.  Depending on 
> the phone model, the access may be via serial/modem port access or via 
> libusb.
>
> I can see what is present via libusb, and I can see what /dev nodes
> let me open them, but I don't see a way of mapping in either direction.

That's what IOKit does.  It's a registry of everything you could ever 
possibly want to know w.r.t. hardware.  Open up 
/Developer/Utilities/IORegistryExplorer and poke around (there are 
other tools like USB Prober and some stuff in 
/Developer/Examples/IOKit).

>> I don't think anyone has wrapped IOKit, but it wouldn't be that hard 
>> to  wrap the useful parts.  Maybe I'll look into it, since I do use 
>> IOKit  for FireWire and USB notifications in one of my apps.  My 
>> current  implementation does this with an Objective-C class compiled 
>> as a Python  extension, so from PyObjC I can just objc.lookUpClass 
>> and talk to it  without writing any additional ugly wrapper code.
>
> I'd be happy to use whatever you can provide :-)

Well, if you take a look at the example, it's really straight-forward 
and you can come up with something specific to your app in just an hour 
or two.  It will be quite some time before I get around to making a 
useful IOKit wrapper.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) neither of my phones are 
compatible with BitPim.  I'd really like to see BlackBerry 7100 
support, but it doesn't even show up as a serial device over USB and I 
don't really know where to start with reverse engineering it to give a 
useful bluetooth profile or to make it do something with USB.  
PocketMac sells a product that I can use to sync contacts/calendar 
stuff, but it doesn't do anything with bluebooth and it doesn't allow 
me to use it as a GPRS modem.

-bob