alicedinunno / hid

Gopher Interface Devices (USB HID)

This package has been forked from karalabe/hid where the development has unfortunately stopped in 2019. The package came with vendored versions of libusb and hidapi which haven't been updated in more than 5 years. I updated and simplified the cgo build commands, so that the package builds again on Linux, Windows and MacOS. As part of the simplification, I removed the vendored version of libusb. It's only needed for Linux, and all major distros provide more recent versions of libusb. You just have to make sure that libusb-1.0-0-dev is installed on your Linux system. On MacOS and Windows libusb is not needed. Both OS have direct hid APIs which are accessed by hidapi.

The vendored version of hidapi is hidapi-0.11.0-7-gaf6c601.

Gopher Interface Devices (USB HID)

Supported platforms at the moment are Linux, macOS and Windows (exclude constraints are also specified for Android and iOS to allow smoother vendoring into cross platform projects).

Linux support

Make sure you have libusb-1.0-0-dev installed on your system.

$ sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev

Cross-compiling

Using go get the embedded C library is compiled into the binary format of your host OS. Cross compiling to a different platform or architecture entails disabling CGO by default in Go, causing device enumeration hid.Enumerate() to yield no results.

To cross compile a functional version of this library, you'll need to enable CGO during cross compilation via CGO_ENABLED=1 and you'll need to install and set a cross compilation enabled C toolkit via CC=your-cross-gcc.

Acknowledgements

Although the hid package is an implementation from scratch, it was heavily inspired by the existing go.hid library, which seems abandoned since 2015; is incompatible with Go 1.6+; and has various external dependencies. Given its inspirational roots, I thought it important to give credit to the author of said package too.

Wide character support in the hid package is done via the gowchar library, unmaintained since 2013; non buildable with a modern Go release and failing go vet checks. As such, gowchar was also vendored in inline (copyright headers and origins preserved).

License

The components of hid are licensed as such:

• hidapi is released under the 3-clause BSD license.
• libusb is released under the GNU LGPL 2.1license.
• go.hid is released under the 2-clause BSD license.
• gowchar is released under the 3-clause BSD license.

Given the above, hid is licensed under GNU LGPL 2.1 or later on Linux and 3-clause BSD on other platforms.