Breathe new life into old Lighting desk "A USB emulation project" - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: rantwhy
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2017, 07:33:15 pm
content: Hi everyone, I'm starting a project with a old HOG iPC this is a DMX light controller that is used for running lights on concerts, theatrics and so on.This unit is a windows 7 embedded system with all its hardware usb based. There is a pc version of the software that can be ran on any pc however the software that this unit runs is made just for the embedded prepackaged system that came with it.What I would like to do is put updated windows hardware in the unit and run the latest version of the software on that hardware, that is the easy part the hard part is that the usb control panel only works on this old software.Basically I want to re-write the driver for the hardware or make a emulator for the usb so when I connect it to the system it thinks its the new hardware.Any information on how to make a usb emulator or how to manipulate windows in to faking the hardware signature would be wonderfulI can make a video of the unit in pieces to show the hardware and chips used if anyone is interested in helping however I think this is more of a windows and software issue to overcome but any ideas would be helpfulAlos here are some links to what the unit looks like and what I'm trying to doFirst is a link to show what the the HOG iPC and its resources for softwarehttps://www2.highend.com/support/controllers/hogipc.aspThis is the new software that I want to run made by the same manufacturerhttps://www.highend.com/products/lighting-consoles/hog-4pcAnd this is the hardware I want the new software to think I havehttps://www2.highend.com/products/controllers/Nanowing.aspas you can see the hardware layout is almost identical and both are usb based there is diagnostic software to test your hardware witch I think this is a great place to get stared because If we can find a way into trucking this program to think we have one hardware connected then we have a test platform to experiment with.I will include the old test software if anyone would like to try and take it apartThe unit I have shows up as "USB Front Panel" and the unit im trying to fake or emulate is ether the Hoglet Wing or the Nano.Thank you everyone so much for any help that you can provide on this project!

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2017, 01:08:44 pm
content: That's not an "old" desk--I was expecting the thread to be about a Vision or something! Why do you want to replace the PC hardware? What's wrong with the current software/hardware?This is not going to be an easy project, especially if you don't have an example of the new hardware you're trying to emulate to examine and test against. The control layout of the iPC looks fairly close to that of the Nano 4, so if you're extremely lucky the hardware/drivers may be similar enough that you can make it work by only changing the PID (somehow). Otherwise, you'll need to fully reverse engineer both the old hardware/driver AND the new hardware/driver to be able to glue them together.

author: rantwhy
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: February 16, 2017, 11:31:04 pm
content: yeah this is mainly a project for usb hacking and software de-compiling because I don't want buy the new one.and i want to update the pc because I will be putting a full copy of windows and the new software to hardware is just a old celeron but that is besides the point.