Kernel Driver for the Tieman Voyager Braille Display (USB)

Authors:
Stéphane Dalton <sdalton@videotron.ca>
Stéphane Doyon  <s.doyon@videotron.ca>

Version 0.8, April 2002

The brlvger driver supports a Braille display (aka Braille terminal)
model Voyager from Tieman.

The driver has been in heavy use for about six months now (as of April
2002) by a very few users (about 3-4), who say it has worked very well
for them.

We have tested it with a Voyager 44, but it should also support
the Voyager 70.

Starting with version 0.8, this driver is being integrated into the
mainstream kernel tree. We will continue to distribute this driver as a
module at least until distributions catch up with the kernel versions in
which this driver is integrated. 

This module requires kernel version 2.4.x. We tested 2.4.7, 2.4.10,
2.4.18-pre5, and several others... If you are using kernel 2.5 then the
driver is already in the kernel.

The driver implements a character device. It uses the major number for
USB devices (180) and the minors 128-131.

Many thanks to the Tieman people: Corand van Strien, Ivar Illing, Daphne
Vogelaar and Ingrid Vogel. They provided us with a Braille display (as
well as programming information) so that we could write this driver. They
replaced the display when it broke and they answered our technical
questions. It is very motivating when companies take an interest in such
projects and are so supportive.

Thanks to Andor Demarteau <ademarte@students.cs.uu.nl> who got this whole
project started and beta-tested all our early buggy attempts.

Installation:

This is a kernel module. It will be compiled for a specific kernel
version, which means you must recompile it if you change your kernel.

USB support must be enabled in your kernel: it must be either compiled
into the kernel or built as modules. You need "Support for USB" plus
either the OHCI or one of the UHCI modules, depending on the type of
controller you have. Recent distributions should have all that already
setup.

You need the kernel sources to compile this module. (Note that you can't
just unpack fresh kernel sources. The kernel must also be configured and
make dep must have been run for the proper header files to be generated.)

The Makefile assumes the kernel sources are in /usr/src/linux. It is also
assumed that these sources are for the same version as the kernel you
are running. If this is not the case then edit the makefile.

Do "make" to compile.

Do "make install" to copy the module to
/lib/modules/<kernel_version>/misc and to run depmod -a.

Insert the module with "modprobe brlvger".

Check /var/log/messages for a confirmation or error message.
