Chapter 3. Drivers and the Input Manager

Table of Contents

Drivers as Input Manager Plug-Ins
Device Types
Position
Digital
Analog
Glove
Gesture
Simulator
The Input Mixer

As its name suggests, the Input Manager is in charge of managing the active input devices and the samples those devices return. Each device driver will hand off a freshly read sample (also known as a sample buffer) to the Input Manager.

Drivers as Input Manager Plug-Ins

The Input Manager itself never cares about the true type of a device. Instead, it looks at each driver as an implementation of the gadget::Input interface. This design lends itself well to a plug-in architecture wherein drivers can be loaded at runtime without being compiled into Gadgeteer. Using the Gadgeteer driver plug-in system, users can write their own device drivers without modifying Gadgeteer at all. Indeed, they need not even compile Gadgeteer from its source. All that is needed is a binary installation of Gadgeteer against which the user-written driver can be compiled.