Trouble with hal_input...

Hello all,

I've been using EMC2 for a while now and just upgraded to 2.4.3 to use the Touchy interface.
That upgrade went very well, but I want to use the keyboard for continuous jog like the Axis interface does.

So, I started by going through wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Simple_Remote_Pendant and believe I have hal_input finding my keyboard. When launching EMC2, I don't get any messages about not being able to find a device - if I sabotage the device name, then I do get an error:

"loadusr -W hal_input -K Keyboard" does not produce any errors,
but "loadusr -W hal_input -K Keyboardddd" does produce an expected error about not being able to locate a matching devices.

I think the lack of an error in the first case means it should be matching something - right?

If so, I should have a series of new pins created like "input.0.key-a".
Unfortunately, no pin, signal, or parameter exists with the "input." prefix.
I am not skilled enough with hal tweaking to know where to go next, so I figured I'd post.

How can I verify that hal_input is indeed locating the keyboard correctly?

Is there anything specific I need to do to cause hal_input to publish its pins?

Thanks in advance,
- Dean

OK, I figured it out. I was doing 2 things wrong:

1) The Touchy interface does not run the custom_postgui.hal file; my net commands there were being ignored. Moving these commands to touchy.hal did the trick.

2) I didn't realize that halmeter doesn't automatically update its list of pins when new pins are created. Moving the usrload of halmeter to later in the startup sequence allowed me to see everything that was going on.

Cheers,
- Dean