A new USB toy driver: MBoxAlert

[Dave Higton]

It seems such a long time since I released anything to drive a USB
device.  I found another daft USB toy and wrote a driver for it.

The latest wonder actually verges on being useful.  It's a driver
for the Dream Cheeky Mail Box Friends Alert, which you can look at
on its manufacturer's web site:

http://www.dreamcheeky.com/mail-box-friends-alert

This is a tiny little thing, about the size of the end of your
thumb, that lights up with various intensities of red, green and
blue in response to USB commands.  (Which idiot thought it was a
good idea to shine green and blue LEDs through red plastic, I
wonder?)  My application makes it possible to get the thing to
light up (or flash) with your chosen colour, just by running an
Obey file.  The contents of the Obey file are just one line, in
what I hope is the most obvious format, so you can freely choose
what colour to use as an alert for which mailbox.  A single mouse
click will cancel the alert.  I've provided several example Obey
files to get you going.

No, the little flag doesn't pop up.  It isn't motorised, or sprung,
or anything that good.  It's like a doll's arm: it stays where you
put it, and that's all it does.

The application is free and is released under the GPL version 2.
It should run on any RISC OS computer with a USB interface:
BeagleBoard, Iyonix or Risc PC.  It automatically detects which
USB stack is present and uses that.

I hope you enjoy it and perhaps find it mildly useful!

You can find it on my web site: http://www.apts04.dsl.pipex.com

Dave

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