xbox 360 chatpad

[drock]

I have been reading up on the xbox 360 chatpad.  It appears to be a very cheap mini keyboard that communicates over a uart.  The raspberry pi community has a driver for it.  I was wondering if any pine users had an interest in doing something similar.  I am not sure where to start writing a driver.  It seems like a fairly simple interface that has been mapped out here. 

I get the main idea is to open a uart, process the inputs, and decipher the key presses. After that is where I am lost as to make the OS see it as a key press input.

Any interest or advice would be cool.  Thanks

[dkryder]

i'm not interested in this chatpad but as far as porting a driver for a start just get the code and start teaching yourself about drivers in general and what makes this specific driver different on the rpi than what it needs to be on your device. unless of course you were more interested in someone giving you a working driver.

[drock]

unfortunately the Pi driver does not have its source available so it will be more of a driver writing project vs a port. The code I linked to was just a package for using with an arduino. The fortunate part is that it does have the communication protocol.

I was more asking for a jumping off point, but I think I am getting there. I have written software using a uart before, but always for a mcu or simple data transfer. From what I have gathered linux actually takes the heavy lifting from the interrupt handler away and we can simply use the scan command which will suspend until the interrupt is thrown and wake the process back up.

I am a bit confused about the differences between each uart on the pine and not sure which one would be best suited. That being said I am miles away from actually connecting the keyboard at the moment.

I am currently working with armbian. Is there anything special that needs to be done to enable a uart on the Pine?