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Virtual com port?

Pixy Software
#1

Is there a way to grab the positions datastream on a PC via USB and
a virtual com port, or other simple method? Target would be VB6.

Getting video also would be even better. What I am looking for is a
stripped-bare VB version of pixymon.

Are the dll’s documented?

Any suggestion welcome for this simplest possible way to get the data.
Maybe passing it through an arduino is the simplest way, except for
the video(?)

Thanks, Gregg

#2

Hi Gregg,

All of the source code is available “here”:https://github.com/charmedlabs/pixy, so you can modify it however you like.

What is the purpose of the virtual com port? I don’t know a lot about virtual coms, but I don’t see why you couldn’t do it. Its just a normal USB com connection with the libusb driver.

As for getting video data, that’s a bit trickier. We don’t support streaming video through your libraries as of now, so the easiest route might be to modify the Pixymon source to dump video data to a file for you.

Hope this helps.

Scott

#3

Thanks Scott,

I’m just looking for the quickest-dirtiest way to grab the data stream
for blobs off the device, and into VB. With a virtual com port (like the
FTDI stuff), you just open a COM port and start grabbing your data from
a buffer and parsing it.

You don’t even need to handle USB - just done by a device driver. I don’t
know anything about libusb - maybe that’s possible. VB handles the COM.

It looks like there is a lot more than that going in the source code you
point to, and that would be a lot of work to port over the VB.

I guess I am just looking for a cruder/quicker way of writing a VB app
that can see your data.

Thanks, Gregg Carlson

#4

Hi Gregg,

Sorry, I thought you were wanting to do something much more complicated. If all you want to do is grab the blob data from USB then you should use “libpixyusb”:https://github.com/charmedlabs/pixy/tree/master/src/host/libpixyusb. This handles the USB interface and Pixy protocol and will expose the data in a nice struct for you. You could then interface your VB code with something simple like the “hello_pixy.cpp”:https://github.com/charmedlabs/pixy/blob/master/src/host/hello_pixy/hello_pixy.cpp code.

Hope this helps.

Scott