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copied!<p>If the watch supports a <a href="http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs#approved" rel="nofollow noreferrer">standard USB device class specification</a> such as HID or serial communication, there might already be a Macintosh driver for it built into the OS. Otherwise, you're going to have to get information about the vendor commands used to communicate with it from one of three sources: the manufacturer; reverse engineering the protocol used by the Windows driver; or from others who have already reverse engineered the protocol in order to support the device on Linux or BSD.</p> <p>USB is a packet-based bus and it's very important to understand the various transaction types. Reading the <a href="http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">USB specification</a> is a good place to start.</p> <p>You can see what data is being transmitted to the device using a USB bus analyzer, which is an expensive proposition for a hobbyist but is well within the reach of most businesses doing USB development. For example, the <a href="http://www.getcatalyst.com/product-conquest.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Catalyst Conquest</a> is $1199. Another established manufacturer is <a href="http://www.lecroy.com/tm/products/ProtocolAnalyzers/usb.asp?menuid=67" rel="nofollow noreferrer">LeCroy (formerly CATC)</a>. There are also software USB analyzers that hook into the OS's USB stack, but they don't show all of the traffic on the bus, and may not be as reliable.</p> <p>I'm not a Mac expert, so take this paragraph with a grain of salt: Apple has a driver development kit called the <a href="http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_HardwareDrivers/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">I/O Kit</a>, which apparently requires you to write your driver in C++, unless they also have some sort of user-mode driver framework. If you're writing it in Python, it will probably be more like a Python library that interfaces to someone else's (Apple's?) generic USB driver.</p>

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