XP-Pen Deco Mini7 v2 FreeBSD Daemon (Unofficial)

A small userspace daemon that allows simple operation of the XP-Pen Deco Mini7 V2 (note: affiliate link) on FreeBSD (will be extended to different types of tablets most likely later on).

• Rationale / some history
• Introduction
• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage

Rationale / some history

This repository emerged out of the frustration that it has been hard to get an otherwise excellent XP-Pen Deco Mini7 V2 up and running easily on FreeBSD. Everytime the device was attached it turned up as pointer and keyboard device as expected (two HID device instances), but the pointer device never started streaming stylus positions. I played around trying to install existing drivers like OpenTabletDriver, tried out xf86-input-wacom, libwacom and many other solutions but they either failed to compile due to heavy dependencies and unsupported platforms or just plainly did not work due to some untraceable errors.

Minor research pointed out that those tablets require an activation sequence to enable output of the HID nodes and will then spill out reports. In addition the HID messages for styli are not compatible with the standard USB mouse driver usm. This lead to the quick overnight development of xppen-mini7-v2-fbsd based on information captured on Windows utilizing Wireshark and USBPcap.

Introduction

xppen-mini7-v2-fbsd is a Python daemon that:

• Locates XP-Pen Deco Mini7 V2 tablets on FreeBSD using PyUSB by their vendor and product ID.
• Replays the Windows-style initialization sequence so the stylus interface enters reporting mode.
• Creates a virtual /dev/input/event* node via FreeBSD's uinput driver and forwards stylus packets with pressure/tilt data.
• Optionally forwards packets to a Unix domain socket instead of uinput. This feature will be used for some applications this author had in mind, it will most likely be useless for anyone else.
• Can run once against an explicit /dev/ugenX.Y path (for example to be executed via a devd hook) or stay resident, periodically scanning for devices and auto-binding when the tablet appears.

Requirements

• FreeBSD 13 or higher with evdev, uinput, and hid support available (either compiled into the kernel like for GENERIC, or loaded via kldload evdev uinput hid if your kernel omits them). If /dev/uinput exists the daemon will most likely work.
• Access to /dev/uinput and to the USB device (typically run as root or grant devfs permissions since we need access to usbconfig and other low level routines).
• Python 3.11 or higher with pyusb installed.

Installation

pip install xppenfbsd

Usage

Foreground daemon that scans for the tablet and logs all received messages and events verbosely:

xppen-fbsd-daemon --scan --verbose

Daemon performing the same action in background:

xppen-fbsd-daemon --scan --daemonize

Launching by specifying an explicit device path (for example when launching useful from devd):

xppen-fbsd-daemon --device ugen0.7 --detach --event-mode 660 --event-group wheel

Socket-only mode:

xppen-fbsd-daemon --socket /var/run/xppen.sock --no-uinput