Installing and Using pywinusb.hid

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Advantages
  • Current limitations
• Installation Instructions
  • Windows
  • Other
• Using pywinusb.hid
  • Utilities
• Feedback and Contributing

Introduction

This project aims to be a simple USB/HID user application space (hence no system drivers needed) 100% python package (without C extensions). Initially targeting simple HID devices management.

The vision for this project is to be something similar to PySerial or PyParallel but for USB/HID hardware enthusiasts.

Advantages

• All python code, using ctypes
• Top level handling of HID events (usage events calling hook function handlers)

Current limitations

Depending on your application you might find these limitations

• Windows only (so far...)
• Maybe speed. I've had feedback by some users that speed is not a problem for high data throughput, but I think you might hit some Python limits if you are require any real time processing.

Installation Instructions

Windows

The most convenient way of installing is using easy_install or pip (see below for pip install commands in Windows). I recommend you do this once you are familiar with the library as you might otherwise loose track of the example source files. However, you can always come back and take a look at the examples or the source browsing the github repository here.

pip install commands:

For Python 2: pip install pywinusb, or py -2 -m pip install pywinusb

For Python 3: py -3 -m pip install pywinusb

(More on pip installation instructions here: https://docs.python.org/3/installing/)

If using a source package (.zip) from PyPi, un-zip your file (or get the source

from the main repository) and run the familiar setup.py install command from the command line, as this is sufficient. Note that setuptools or distribute (for python 3) are required.

Other

So far only Windows OS it's supported.

Using pywinusb.hid

View the ./examples directory for some (ok, few right now) scripts. These show, for instance, how to use pywinusb.hid to handle events from HID class devices usages events.

Latest code and some Wiki information can be found on the main project code page.

Utilities

More on this later...

• The module pywinusb.hid.tools contains a function to check HID class devices capabilities, for now it provides a basic human readable text report (see the hid.core package, run it as main while HID class devices are connected to your system)

Feedback and Contributing

Feel free to contact me! use the main code project page, just tell what do you think about the project or bring me anything you think might be cool to consider.

Any participation it's appreciated, feel free to contribute more examples or applications or just a reference to your open source project that uses the library.