Suggestion for RandyT(or anyone else considering making an LED controller board)

[Grasshopper]

I've just been reading the hardware review thread about the allegedly flaky software provided with the LEDWiz.

I have a suggestion for Randy, or anyone else considering making a similar board.

Why not make the programming interface simulate a standard USB mass storage device? What do I mean by this? Well the computer would detect the LEDWiz as a pretend USB hard drive. On this harddrive would be a single file that contained all the LEDWiz's settings. If you wanted to change the settings then you would simply copy over a new file with the same name and thus overwrite the original.

This would probably be quite hard to implement, so why bother? Well it would be a completely universal solution. Almost every operating system these days can handle USB storage devices without the need for special drivers. Even DOS can handle these devices if the motherboard provides USB legacy support. Just as importantly, almost every programming language can handle writing to a file without the need for special libraries, DLLs, etc. You would not be tied to Windows or even PCs. You could even program the device from an MSDOS batch file.

Incidentally, the same approach could also be used for programming keyboard encoders.

[richms]

A virtual serialport that you could echo commands into would achieve the same thing (I think they work in dos under some bioses too) and would be a lot easier to impliment, because the virtual disk would need a virtual file system and virtual fat and heaps of other virtual-ness