PowerMate Care and Feeding
That soothing blue glow
Every now and again I’ll get an email at work asking for documentation, or sample code demonstrating how to communicate with the PowerMate. Generally, I’ll send out some sample code (taking the time to create a sample if I can’t recall where I stashed it the last time), and make a mental note to come up with a better solution someday. My mental notes seem to be written in invisible ink.
Well this time around, I went through “proper channels” to find out if it would be okay to post this information publicly. Somewhere to make it easier for folks to find, and Griffin has been kind enough to give me permission to do just that. If you’re looking for sample code to discover, receive data from, and control a PowerMate, your in luck because I’ve created a repository on github called PMDemo to demostrate just that, and you can find it here:
http://github.com/somegeekintn/PMDemo
You might also take a look if you’re just generally interested in the IOKit, HID devices (that’s redundant), and what not.
And speaking of the PowerMate, version 3.0 will be wrapping up soon (I think), but we’re making room for another batch of beta testers. If you’re interested, the only requirements are that you:
- have a PowerMate.
- are running Snow Leopard.
- are willing to write this email address and tell me you’re interested in beta testing the new PowerMate software.
If this is you, give me a holler, and I’ll hook you up. I really think…hope… thope. I thope you’ll like it.