We are looking to add add support, in our HIDmaker code generator products, for MikroE PIC compilers. I would really appreciate your suggestions. I hope it is OK to post my questions here in this forum.
We originally made HIDmaker because we were really frustrated with the difficulty of working with those demo programs from the chip manufacturer. I got mad and did something about it, so now people can literally get a USB HID project running, end to end, sending the custom data you specify, in only 10 minutes.
We have happy HIDmaker FS and HIDmaker 32 customers all over the world, and those who have bought it really love it, so we'd like to add support for MIKROE compilers now.
But here's the problem. Because everyone wants to use different compilers and different processors, we originally made HIDmaker work with as many different compilers as possible, on both the PIC side and the PC side.
Unfortunately, doing that made the product more expensive than if we could have delivered a version that only works on, say, just 1 PIC compiler and 1 PC compiler.
Here is what we are considering for MikroE users:
- 1 -- Provide some free sample projects you can try for yourself. We cannot give away our proprietary generated source code, so we would give you a hex file, an exe file, and an experimenters guide (PDF).
2 -- We also see all sorts of misunderstandings about HID, all over the web. To correct that, we are thinking of offering a low cost online course, with experiments you can run yourself, on your own MikroE boards.
3 -- Offer several less-expensive versions of HIDmaker, that generate code for just 1 or 2 compilers on each side (Host vs PIC device side).
- * Would these offerings be of any interest to you?
* Which MikroE compilers would you want it to generate code for ?
* Which PC compilers would you want it to generate code for?
* Which PIC devices would you want to be able to work with?
* We want to give you some interactivity, so you could press a button on your PIC board and see something happen on the PC program. To do that, we need to know what resources are available on your PIC board, and what pins they are connected to.
* So please tell us which MikroE boards you would like us to make demos for. (Only PIC based boards at the moment.)
* It would help us to help you, if you could tell us what aspects of USB and HID class give you the most trouble: how can we help you overcome those problems?
* We would value any other comments or suggestions you would care to make.