BlinkStick Xamarin (android)

Support
#1

Hi all,

Has anyone had much luck communicating with the BlinkStick from within an Xamarin (android) project? I’m trying to determine what the best course of action is. So far I have two options:

  1. Create a binding library to the android-support.v4.jar
  2. Manually port the code from the java src to xamarin.

Option 1 I’m not familiar with and seems to result in a whole bunch of errors whilst trying to compile the mapping library. Hopefully someone else has managed to do this.

Option 2 seems a better route. Well, that is until I get to the ControlTransfer methods. It seems Xamarin framework doesn’t support the addressing I need (0x20) for the UsbAddressing parameter.

Anyone had luck with this?

Regards.

#2

Can you integrate standard Android libraries into Xamarin? Don’t have much experience with the framework, but I would presume they should allow to do that. There is BlinkStick Android implementation available here:

#3

Thanks for such a quick response, I appreciate that.

I’m aware of the Android API you linked. I saw that it contains a jar file, which is what I was originally mapping to. When the mapping failed I decided to port the java source across to a standard library which is usable in xamarin. This basically wraps up Android calls within its framework. This is when I came across the addressing issue I mentioned earlier.

To be fair I think I’m probably making this more complex than it needs to be. I might just stick with creating a project in android studio using java and use the API you mentioned from there.

#4

Quick update. Got it working! I went the Java (Android Studio) route in the end. I basically wanted to make a car app so I can change the colours of the lights in the footwell.

https://youtu.be/zZGBzBZtMmA

I will probably end up buying another flex for the other side. Quick question, how does the BlinkStick flex cope with being put into a USB splitter, power-wise? I have limited USB slots in the car.