search

ondrej1024 / crelay

Controlling different relay cards for home automation with a Linux software
GNU General Public License v2.0
81 stars 31 forks source link

Sainsmart 16-channel with USB-HID #6

Closed khilman closed 8 years ago

khilman commented 8 years ago

This currently suports the Sainsmart 4- and 8-channel relays which use FTDI, but the Sainsmart 16-channel uses USB-HID, and looks different from the current hidapi driver.

Has anyone tried the Sainsmart 16-channel. A very poor attempt at documenting them is on the Sainsmart page for this part: http://www.sainsmart.com/mouse-over-image-to-zoom-sainsmart-16-channel-controller-usb-hid-programmable-control-relay-module-kit-sainsmart-16-channel-controller-usb-hid-programmable-control-relay-module-kit-sainsmart-16-channel-controller-usb-hid-programmable-contro.html

ondrej1024 commented 8 years ago

Looks interesting. Basically this is a small add on module with mini USB connector which drives the 16 output pins to control the relays on the card. Could also be used for other cards I guess. Documentation is indeed very poor, but more than is usually supplied. I wonder what the HID_CMD_SIGNATURE is. I downloaded the zip file from the download link but it contains only Windows exe and dll files, pretty useless for us. But it also says

We will offer you a detailed project introduction and their source code(Contact us via support@sainsmart.com).

Could be worth a try.

khilman commented 8 years ago

A little more experimentation and digging and I found out that the description about how to program these on the Sainsmart page is worthless. Thankfully, someone used a protocol analyzer to reverse engineer the Windows driver and wrote a node.js utility: https://github.com/mvines/relay

I used that to hack up a quick C program (attatched below) using hidapi that is working fine for me. With that, it should be easy to convert to a crelay driver.

sain-usb-hid.c.txt

khilman commented 8 years ago

Implemented in pull request. Closing.