I'm sure I started a thread on this some time ago, but I guess that was the old site...

When I have time I like to tinker with hardware control utilising AROS of course, typically in the run up to Halloween (hence the timing) to run our seasonal display (trick-or-treaters love a jump-scare) and also as mentioned before I have an old laptop with a damaged screen running our central heating system with a serial control box and usb to serial adapters driven by a Hollywood program.

The point of this thread is just to document any unusual hardware for this purpose that works with AROS.

First entry: I noticed last week a seller on Amazon was stocking devices based on the CH9329 chip. These have previously been avaialble through AliExpress, but I'be never been too sure about that site. The purpose of this chip is to 'spoof' a USB keyboard and mouse. You can drive it through serial input from a microcontroller to generate HID events, and then of course you could pick those up in Trident to pretty much anything. So a whole sensor network could be set up (PIRs, IR beams, pressure pads, button pushes from a 'smat pen'..) to trigger different events.

The device has just arrived on connecting to AROS 64 bit I was very please to see it's reconised as a combination device (keyboard, mouse and HID events) with the configuration pages opening as expected. So the next thing to do is get a microcontroller programmed up* and see if I can send through events.

If anyone would like to have a play with this device the link is https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D44W1YPV?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title. Quite cheap too at just £6.

Cheers,
Nigel.

*I use PicAxe microcontrollers as, being designed for educaton thay are very easy to program in BASIC or Blocky. They have a browser-based IDE & simulator which works in OWB. Unfortunately downloading to the device is not supported so a Windows machine is still needed to install the program.

I actually use one of these with a bare metal agentic loop.

https://www.amazo...0&th=1

Claude specifically has it's own PC to debug AROS on. the keyboard and mouse inputs work, the rndis networking I needed a driver for which I have now. I use a simple network shell deamon that allows the agents to launch applications from shell, the hid devices allow them to interact directly with the keyboard and mouse from bios all the way too AROS. the serial logger directly feeds them.

So currently I have 2 clause sessions one on my build server , another on AROS itself and they work together debugging and porting to AROS(I have a custom MCP server allowing them to cross talk).

So while this is a hardware tinkering and could be useful to other people ... it's much more for my personal use.

I would love to see the Amiga Home Assistant client ported to AROS. I have little time and resources for that but if anyone is interested: https://github.com/evil4dmin/ami2ha
I read the source, and beside evident redundant code (AI code), it should be a simple task (MUI UI).
In my opinion HA is the pinnacle of hardware tinkering: Serial, WIFI, BT, Zigbee, MQTT, HTTPS, etc.