GoKawiilGriffin PowerMate driver for modern MacOS
This small driver enables the Griffin PowerMate, a nifty little device from days gone by. What does the PowerMate do? It is a knob that you can twist or that you can press. That's it. It also has a blue LED in the base that can change intensity based on what you're doing.
When it was released, it was intended to assist video and audio production by adding a scrollable knob to your desktop. Of course, modern controllers exist that offer many more literal bells and whistles, but there is something... quaint... about this early device.
To install, open the DMG and drag PowerMate Agent to your Applications folder. Then, launch PowerMate Agent. Of course, it won't do anything without a PowerMate, so go dig around in your junk USB drawer and dust it off! You will see a new item in your top menu to control the behavior of the PowerMate.
The PowerMate acts as a scroll control, so if the active window or control has a scroll option, turning the dial will scroll the window or increase/decrease selected value. You can reverse the scroll direction if you don't like the default scroll direction.
The PowerMate also acts as a mouse button. A momentary push of the button acts as a mouse click. A long-press of the button acts as a right-click. You can also change the behavior so that a long-press acts as a double-click.
Pretty simple, eh?
Technical details.
A small macOS driver that opens the Griffin PowerMate (VID 0x077d , PID 0x0410 ) over USB HID, reads its 6-byte reports, and exposes button and rotation events so you can map them to actions (e.g. scroll, click, media keys).
The device reports on the bus but does nothing by default on macOS; this library seizes the device and delivers events to your app.
... continue reading