[Tutor] Talking to hardware with python

[Ferry Dave Jäckel]

Hello list,

I want to talk to a custom usb-device (cypress CY7C63001A with firmware from  
ak modulbus) with python on win32 and linux (and maybe mac).
For win32 there is a driver (as sys-file) and for linux an old deprecated 
driver which I'm going to rewrite for kernel 2.6.x.

As I have only minimal experience with c and c++ this project is hard, but 
fun. And I have many questions ;);) Only some of them are python specific, 
so ignore them if you feel they are way too OT.

I'm not sure about the way I should go:
I think I want to have a c++-interface (or just plain c? but this doesn't 
give me a nice python object?!?), exposed to python by swig. This interface 
has to be the same across all platforms. On every platform I want to have a 
device driver.
The linux one should be quite simple (good usb-howtos, an old driver as 
basis to work on), but I'm not sure whether it would be better to use 
libusb instead. 
On win32 there already is a driver, but I don't know how to talk to a win32 
device and write a c++-interface for it, without any headers. I have never 
done any win32 programming and don't know the win32 api. 

My IDE of choice is Eclipse with PyDev and CDT (and cygwin/gcc for win32), 
so I can use the same tools with all platforms (and all tools are OSS). Is 
this a reasonable choice?

If I understood the docs, I got the big picture right.

Any hints and tips (better ways/tools or typical pitfalls...) are welcome!

Thank you,
        Dave