Re: INKA braille display driver for Brltty and Gnopernicus

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Jason White <jasonw ariel ucs unimelb edu au> writes:

> My main question is how a driver for the INKA display can be added to
> both Brltty and Gnopernicus, with minimal effort, and preferably
> without requiring two separate driver implementations at least to the
> extent that it is feasible to share code.
>
> I know that a "native-mode" driver for Baum displays is already
> included in the Gnopernicus sources, and that it supports the Vario
> displays (there is some mention of DM80 and INKA in the source code,
> as I recall, but I don't know how complete the support is).

Looking at baumbrl.c reveals some special casing code for the INKA display.
However, the initialisation code appears to be still commented with
TBI (ToBeImplemented?).  I guess the INKA uses a different protocol
then the Vario models?  Since INKA is a Baum device, I guess chances should
be pretty good that it will eventually be supported by Gnopernicus
natively.

> Brltty, as I understand it, supports Baum Vario displays under
> emulation mode, but not, as yet, the native protocol.

I myself wrote the driver for the non-emulation mode protocol.  I recall
that the final code I released still had some problems which prevented
users from using it, but it might be that this has been fixed
by Dave at some point.  However, I do not know if a native baum protocol
implementation would help you with support for the INKA.

About your actual question regarding how to get support for the INKA in
both worlds: Gnopernicus has a sort of bridging driver which allows
you to use BRLTTY instead of native gnopernicus braille drivers.
This means that if you got support for the INKA in brltty, you can
use it with this bridging code without any other modifications
to Gnopernicus or brltty.  However, if the native code in Gnopernicus
for INKA gets finished at some point, that would give you INKA support
in Gnopernicus, but not in BRLTTY.  The code would need to be ported over
to brltty.
Hope this helps
-- 
CYa,
  Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
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