What do gamepads, joysticks, guitars and even android glow palettes have to do with graphics creation? Quite a lot, it turns out... especially if one is immersed in the culture of Open Source innovators, hardware hackers and other interesting types.

Specifically, though, this presentation will give an overview of hacking the Inkscape vector graphics drawing program to accept various input from, and even output to, a somewhat eclectic collection of hardware devices. These range from inexpensive to costly, off-the-shelf to custom, common to unique, sane to silly... And also a surprisingly timed request that came in to help those suffering from some extreme disabilities.

The talk will cover design and motivations, along with several criteria that guided the efforts at different times. Much of the focus will be with software at several levels, including API design decisions, driver writing and leveraging considerations and various lessons learned. XInput, GTK+ extended devices and custom interfacing will all be highlighted.

Various hardware options will be covered, including support for professional 6DoF engineering input hardware, gamepads and joysticks, Wii controller based options, game guitars and custom Android-based physical IO devices. Of the latter, design of both hardware and software for a glowing android-based artists' palette will explored along with some of the motivations and inspirations involved. And odd as some of these might sound, there are sound reasons that will be revealed for using even the most eclectic seeming of them.

By the end of the presentation those attending should be able to gain inspiration on how out-of-the-box thinking might be applied to their own projects, along with insight on software API design & implementation, and hardware hacking motivation. And finally hilarity most likely will ensue with attempts to form a volunteer game-controller guitar band to create a collaborative graphics performance piece.