Phidgets USB Interfaces

I’d like to see possible future support for the Canadian-made and inexpensive Phidget analogue / digital devices.

*Phidgets Inc.

*Phidgets USA

An excerpt from the site:

Phidgets are an easy to use set of building blocks for low cost sensing and control from your PC. Using the Universal Serial Bus (USB) as the basis for all Phidgets, the complexity is managed behind an easy to use and robust Application Programming Interface (API). Applications can be developed quickly in Visual Basic, VBA (Microsoft Access and Excel), LabView, Java, Delphi, C and C++.

Nice system! Not really really low-cost (like the Arduino ), but very comprehensive, both hardware- and software-wise.

From a first glance I’d say you can already connect them to vvvv using the Phidget Web Service? Quote:

The Phidget Web Service is a socket based threaded server that you can run on your system to serve out any attached Phidget devices to the outside world.

It talks via UDP. you can parse that in vvvv.

I didn’t take the time to read the documentation, but typically these kinds of interfaces connect to USB via a virtual COM Port (almollst always using the same chipset by FTDI). If so, then you can also parse the communication from each device directly with the RS232 node in vvvv.
Look for the driver that is installed when you connect the USB. I presume it’s an FTDI chipset/driver, and an additional COM port will appear? Have you checked the Phidget documentation for “RS232 protocol”?

also quite interesting is dtools from the stanford hci department. seems to be a nice toolkit for prototyping physical interfaces (see the videos). dlinks features seem to be quite complementary to vvvv´s, but it seems to share many of the same goals. the dtools toolkit communicate with osc, so communicating should be possible…