 |
Author |
Topic: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2) (Read 1444 times) |
|
PiOtr
|
Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« on: Dec 15th, 2004, 5:06pm » |
|
Hey every body!
I've a project where I would like to detect the movement of two mice at the same time.
I plan to connect one usb-mouse to usb and one other mouse to the PS/2 port to be able to differentiate the two signals.
Do you think it would be possible with Processing?
(Or even with an other software?)
|
Yaaah!
|
|
|
gll
 
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #1 on: Dec 23rd, 2004, 8:38am » |
|
Wow, that's a good project. I was thinking about this today. I've no clue, I did a research on google about that and I've found just the opposite, people who complain about having two mices and one pointer.
It would be great for collaborative work. It sound strange to me that the OS never implemented such kind of things; two keyboards, two mices. MySelf, I've problems using my tablet and my mouse.
But collaborative pointers should be in every systems. Maybe, it give a great idea of the solitude that comes with a computer.
I'm thinking about one great projet done by yugop. It was a small database where you see other users movments on a page. That's really amazing.
I've no clues about how to deal with two pointers at the same time, but I'm curious about how to do that.
|
guillaume LaBelle
|
|
|
gll
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #4 on: Dec 27th, 2004, 12:19am » |
|
The mice battle in XP;
There's many users at the same time with their own pointer, usefull at christmas!
Thx, toxi, have a mice xmas time too. 
|
guillaume LaBelle
|
|
|
bsr
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #5 on: Jan 5th, 2005, 2:33pm » |
|
i was giving this some thought last night for some reason...
a much simpler way to do this codewise would be to network two computers and have data sent between them, you could use a simple video-mixer to combine the output from each. not very elegant maybe but a simple hack for an installation piece.
|
http://hippocamp.net
|
|
|
gll
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #6 on: Jan 5th, 2005, 9:19pm » |
|
I didn't know the telnet tradition, but for what I've understood, you could use the same OS by remote clients. This was well implemented for the limited ressources of the computers at that time.
But with the shift to the micros, it's more like the easy riders paradigm; the cowboy, riding his own horse, the user in front of his system. In 1984, when I was playing at Flight Simulator on my Apple IIe, I was playing with my friends. It was too complex to control the airplane for one single person, he was controlling the speed and I was controlling the direction. It was done with keyboards and there's was conflicts because at that time, the keyboards buffers were accepting just one key at time.
Just think to the school cars, with two driving wheels and two set of pedals, but one single motor. With game consoles, there's a bunch of games built for multi-players on the same scene.
It might be ugly and unusefull, but there's a lot of situations where it would be great to share mices in one OS. A luxury?
|
guillaume LaBelle
|
|
|
Maarten
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #7 on: Jan 6th, 2005, 11:19pm » |
|
on Dec 25th, 2004, 6:48am, amoeba wrote:
That merely talks about having two mice active to control one cursor. I think PiOtr wants two separate cursors so two users can be doing different things at the same time.
For apps running on Windows, the answer is that this isn't possible in any easy exportable way. The Win32 API does not give you any way to detect (for example) what actual device a WM_LBUTTONDOWN event came from. So anything built on top of Win32 (i.e. ports of the Java libraries) tends to suffer that problem.
You might be able to do this using DirectInput (part of DirectX); haven't looked into that. That would be a Windows-only solution and require people to have a reasonably up to date version of DX installed.
The common way to have two cursors, if you're just setting up a handful of systems for, say, a research project, is to run a special device driver for the second mouse, which generates a new kind of event into the event queue. That works but it's hard to get other people to install your wacky driver.
Another common scenario (as someone else noted) is networked collaboration apps, where the events for one of the cursors come from a remote mouse via the network. I'm sure you can find code support for that scenario.
/Maarten.
|
|
|
|
|
Maarten
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #8 on: Jan 6th, 2005, 11:30pm » |
|
Actually, I'm going to correct myself: you *can* do this via Win32 on Windows, using Raw Input. That effectively amounts to writing a user-space device driver, without actually having to install a system level driver. So you *could* develop a Java library do to this, and use other native routes on other platforms, but it's not pretty.
There's a bunch of discussion about multiple cursors between MS developers here.
|
| « Last Edit: Jan 6th, 2005, 11:31pm by Maarten » |
|
|
|
|
gll
|
Re: Get input from 2 mice (usb and PS/2)
« Reply #9 on: Jan 7th, 2005, 11:32am » |
|
Thx Maarten for the link.
|
guillaume LaBelle
|
|
|
|
