|
This is really too general a question. There are LOTS of ways to control hardware.
If you are talking about standard hardware (like the mouse or a hard drive or a video card) then generally there is a standard interface/API that you can access and then sometimes there is a manufacturer specific API which may give you more functionality that is available though the OS.
Course if you are talking about custom hardware then you need to tell us what technology the hardware uses to interact with the computer: PCI, ePCI, IDE, EIDE, AGP, SATA, IR, Serial, Parallel, USB, Firewire, IEEE 1394, Ethernet... I am sure there are more.
Generally you want to use the OS as much as possible (since this is part of an OS's job). So you can search google for "interfacing using ________" and find info on that technology. Generally this is a good area to search Amazon for a book on since generally you have electronics and programming.
|