Forums Developers Idea! USB read/write

Hey! How about a USB read and write for
mIRC?

ehhm, do you want to explain that...
do you mean read and write to an USB harddrive device? if so, that is alreaddy posible sice windows normaly gives the "pen" or whatever a <letter>:

what did you have in mind?

The mIRC would have a remote event like "on USBREAD" to see data received from it, and a command to send data to it like "/usbwrite".

what kind of data? if files make an alias dude if not, what for? web cam or something?

Umm you are aware that every device communicates over a USB cable differently right? Hence the existence of drivers. I see no scenario where accessing the raw USB data is useful, unless you are trying to communicate with a device you wrote yourself. And, if you have the expertise to create a hardware device using the USB interface, why can't you just write a device driver? Also, why would mIRC need this? How does communicating with a USB device relate to chatting? I can't even see an indirect link such as with sockets (!weather scripts for example). I can't see why this would be useful to anyone. Oh and by the way, the system would have to be MUCH more complex than /usbwrite and /usbread. For example, how do you know which USB port to write to? How do you determine whether to use USB 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0 to communicate? How do you handle if there is a USB hub connected? What about daisy chained USB devices?

Thats why device drivers are needed. If you want to communicate with a particular device, learn C.

Okay... Of course there'd be parameters!
for example --
-n <type> for which one (-p 1.0) (-p 1.1) (-p 2.0)
on usbread, like i said already...

why? i have a pocket pc with activesync... and an ircchat program, i want to see how it works.

if there's no reason for mirc usb, then there's no reason for mirc sockets.

=/

You listened to nothing I said. Yeah so you can tell mIRC which protocol to use. And how does mIRC know whether the port and/or device support that protocol? How does mIRC know what format to send the information to the device in and how should mIRC know when to do it? IT CAN'T. You might think this idea is useful and really thats irrelevant, because your idea is practically impossible.

Im afraid codemastr is right. USB technology itself is a house of cards. Even large companies (motorola being one) cant seem to make very stable drivers. I reffer you to usb cable modems. Theres litteraly a plethera of methods and data you can send to a device but the problem is theres no method for you to know the device. When you install a device the usb port looks up the driver for it. when a company makes a device they design the driver to recognize it. But to my knowledge theres no usb driver that can recognize ALL usb devices wich there would have to be in order for mirc to use it. You cant add a /usb command that only works sometimes for some devices etc..

On top of that lets look at speed. USB is fast but who cares how fast you can get the data if you cant process it 1/10 th the speed. Sorta defeats the purpose of using usb.

On the other side it would be nice for a driver to support mirc but i somehow doubt logitech will distribute mirc capable usb drivers with thier webcams etc.. and im almost positive noone here will undergo the task of designing one for any particular device.

The concept would certainly be neet to have but just isnt practical from an irc client p.o.v (even though i feel mirc stopped being "just" an irc client long ago)

Hmm, I understand that USB port spys exist. Now, I haven't tried it yet and know relatively little about USB technology... but I would imagine that there is some plain and dirty way of communicating and receiving raw data through USB, regardless of the device.

Take TCP for example. It's a simple data transport method (like USB I'm guessing) with packet addressing, etc. TCP knows nothing about HTTP or FTP or NNTP or SMTP, etc... but that doesn't stop mIRC from performing a /sockopen and /sockwrite. Somewhere in USB, there must lie raw data, and somehow there must be a way to access it (may require some custom/hacked all-access driver).

Do I think mIRC needs this? no.

- Raccoon

Yes there would be "dirty" ways to send raw data but there is a difference between being able to send TCP data to a socket and USB. The difference is, if you send malformed data to a socket, worst case is the server disconnects you for sending invalid data. You send malformed data to a USB device, and best case, your computer crashes, worst case the device gets ruined. Devices have "control sequences" that can screw things up. For example (fake example) consider a printer. If you tell the printer to "spray ink" before you tell it to move the print head over the paper it is possible it may spread ink all over its internal components. With a scanner, you send a command to move left/right. Well if the scanner head is already all the way to the left and you tell it to move to the left you might burn out the motor. Most companies don't make "safety" features to prevent such things. The reason is, the company makes the device, the company makes the driver, therefore the company doesn't care about "what if a user writes a different driver that isn't as safe as ours?" Because such things would most likely void the warranty anyway. There are many many things that could go wrong. mIRC scripts can't just cause backdoors anymore, they can now destroy devices. Consider a digital camera hooked up to a USB port. I send a control signal to tell the camera to open the appature up, and I make it open it so much that the light damages the sensitive components inside. Or I send codes to a USB hard drive to make it spin out of control until it overheats and burns out.

There is no safe way to communicate with a USB device other than using the device driver, and if you are using a device driver, than you can only communicate with specific devices that you know how to work with the driver. All in all, it would be foolish to add this to mIRC.

Hush, you'll ruin the course of history I have all planned and laid out. My ultimate goal in life is to make the Good Times Virus possible. It is with /usbwrite that I will make it so.

lmfao! @ that link.

Use a dll if you're soo determined :P