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CS510P: Rust Programming

Programming Project: Concept2 HID Interaction

Project Members

Michael Bottini ([email protected])

Overview

Concept2 is a manufacturer of exercise equipment. Each of their ergometers are monitored by an embedded microcomputer called a Performance Monitor, (PM) which tracks data about the intensity and duration of the workout. This PM is a Human Interface Device, (HID) which allows any operating system that implements HID drivers to interact with it by either USB or Bluetooth.

The interaction is wide; the PM implements most of the Communications Specification for Fitness Equipment, (CSAFE) which defines a wide interface for controlling and monitoring fitness equipment.

However, at this time, there are only a couple of available ways to interact over this stack - the official, closed-source implementation from Concept2, which is only available on Android, and a couple of abortive attempts to implement a NodeJS server that interfaces with the device and presents data. We can do better than this.

Existing Resources

  • Rust has an HID crate, which serves as a wrapper over the hidapi C library. This library serves as an abstraction for interacting with HIDs over both USB and Bluetooth. Thus, the only thing that I need to do is learn how to use it.
  • Concept2 has an ad-hoc, disorganized specification from 2006 in their SDK that describes a lot of its functionality. It does not describe HID interaction at all and is limited to a description of CSAFE and the SDK functions that it implements. The SDK's functionality consists of several closed-source DLLs that only work on Windows, but are helpful in that the functions provide examples of CSAFE commands that the PM will respond to.
  • The existing NodeJS implementation, which is useful despite the fact that its HID implementation is very different from Rust's.

Goals

  • Learn how to use HID in Rust.
  • Implement the CSAFE protocol and a variety of commands, both for sending requests to the PM and parsing responses, and create a Rust crate that provides low-level abstractions for interacting with the PM.
  • Create rigorous documentation of this protocol for other people who want to follow in my footsteps and don't want to read a disorganized heap of specs from 15 years ago.
  • Implement a CLI that uses the above library to obtain data from the PM and print it to the terminal.
  • Implement a GUI that clones the existing closed-source ErgData Android application so that anyone with a PC or laptop can interact with a PM instead of using a tablet or phone. I will likely use GTK for this, but I might also try Qt.

Concerns

None with the meat of the project. I have already figured out HID, implemented a couple of CSAFE commands, gotten back responses from the device, and done a bunch of documentation of the protocol.

Repo

https://github.com/mbottini/concept2