glovePIE

Glove Programmable Input Emulator 

Super cool application.   I've been meaning to download and try out glovePIE for a long time.   I did pick up a $15 Essential Reality P5 Glove from Wall Mart when they dumped them a few years ago. However it's the Wii Remote support that has been driving the interest in glovePIE lately, and it drove my interest as well.

My use of the Wii remote on my PC is still pretty flaky, probably due to Bluetooth being generally flaky transport :(

But I'm very impressed with the feature set of GlovePIE, in fact it almost matches a tool concept that I worked on many years ago at the end of my real interest in VR.  That concept being scriptable IO routing hub.

I've used PD, and PERL scripts to achieve this, and certainly PD fits the bill pretty well, but GlovePIE with support for MIDI, OSC, and numerous game controlers seems to do most of what I'm looking for and more. And has a different mindset than PD; it's really foucused on routing input.

The thing that is the most interesting to me is to to get unique input from multiple mice or multiple keyboards.  That is something that I have not though possible or seen done before, even thoguh I've considered it and looked for solutions myself.  I've toyed with the idea of using a hacked up keyboard as a really cheap source of a lot of button inputs, but the problem is that it competes with using a keyboard in the normal way.  GlovePIE opens that hacking avenue in a new way.

Imagine a robot that has an on board laptop, (common enough, I've got my home brew version), but instead of using a micro controller interface board to track some wheel encoders, just mount a couple of USB mice on the wheels and hook them up via USB. 

You could use ball mice and crack it open and use the encoders included, but you could just use a couple of optical mice and plunk them right on the wheel hub without opening them up at all.
While blocking the input of those mice from being sent to windows, and still sending the laptop touch pad to windows so the laptop still worked as usual.
Then I'll go ahead and use the mice buttons as bumber inputs too.
I'm definatly going to try putting this train of though into practice and I'll report back on it's success, and weather it turns out to be any cheaper or easier than other mechanisms.

I don't see support for reading or writing to a com port, or a way to communicate directly with say Flash.   But with OSC and some other translators you can build a transport mechanism for those as well, which has been my current solution.  The support for Joysticks, Mice, and Keyboards is clearly the strong point.

The scripting language is so flexible that you could write in just about any familiar syntax you like, it's actually a bit confusing how flexible it is partucularly when reading examples.

At any rate the author Carl Kenner recommends the use of a couple of familiar and useful tools in conjunction with GlovePIE specifically: PPJoy and MIDI Yoke.

To that I would add FLOSC to communicate OSC to Flash, and something like Serial Proxy aka Serproxy, which is meant to get Serial to Flash, though what I'm really looking for is serial to OSC.

That Serial-> OSC feature is still missing, which is certanly needed sometimes.  In fact I see a project for it here. 

But for now I have some PD and PERL scripts to handle Serial <-> OSC <-> flash; and they are still needed in the mix.
I've got a PERL server that I use to route Serial and OSC to and from Flash that perhaps I should package up and make available again, I have released it in the past, as FlashNOW, but that was without the Serial and OSC routing which is still a little messy.

 Anyway let me know if you have any alternative solutions to the IO routing, or anything that you need and just can't find the translator for.