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.

Every now and again, I’ll get an email from someone that has seen this picture on flickr and they are looking for more information on how to write their own code or just curious how what’s being used to drive the keyboard, etc. In the past I’ve answered each person individually, but it probably makes more sense to write it up once here where Google, and hence everyone else, can find it.

The software being used in the picture is an experimental plugin for Proxi. It works pretty much like any other message task (Screen Message, Bubble, etc), so you can push information to it using any Proxi trigger. I decided not to include it in the main release because I didn’t think it was that good, and because I figured there were only a handful of Mac users with Logitech G15’s. Perhaps there are more than I originally suspected?

So Proxi is one way to use the G15 with a Mac, but if that doesn’t do it it for you, maybe some code will. I pieced together an application that demonstrates how to write to the display and also how to read the 5 buttons immediately below the display. I’m using this to clear and navigate the display and they are, from left to right, clear display, home, scroll up, scroll down, and end. The demo app mirrors the whatever the tiny NSTextView is showing in the G15 display. The demo seems to work well enough, but it was cobbled together pretty quickly so if there are any problems with it just let me know. Also please let me know if this was helpful to you, maybe I’ll put more stuff like this up in the future.

Grab the code here: G15 Demo w/source