Dave Higton has been responsible for a wide variety of RISC OS software, including AntiSpam (now developed by Frank de Bruijn). Most recently, he has been working on drivers and supporting software for a number of USB devices under RISC OS.

These include USB FM radios from D-Link and AVerMedia, for which Dave provides software and command files which allow you to tune the radios, turn them on and off, and more. They can be controlled from !Alarm or similar software, so that you can configure the computer to record a complete series of radio programmes, or whatever you wish. It is even possible to run both the D-Link radio and the AVerMedia radio from one computer and control them separately.

Dave has also written K8055, a demonstration application which reads data from, and sends data to, a Velleman K8055 USB I/O card. Dave mainly intended this to show how easy it is to write USB drivers, both for Castle and Simtec stacks - this particular driver took less than a week from start to finish, and porting from one stack to another took about one hour. It might also be of interest to those who require additional I/O requirements over what modern RISC OS computers provide.

Dave can also talk about the possibility of support for USB speakers under RISC OS; and maybe other devices as well.

In his demonstration at ROUGOL, Dave will be showing a number of these USB devices in use connected to both an Iyonix and a Risc PC. He comments that a lot of his work will mainly be of interest to programmers. However, everyone else should certainly find it interesting to see what extra things can be done with the USB ports that modern RISC OS computers now have.

Dave's USB software can be found here