I am working with a pressure-sensing mattress having a USB interface. The maker provides USB device drivers for Windows, and an API written in C++ which has functions to request data and set some parameters.
Currently, I cannot use this sensor for testing some Python data-visualization scripts directly, having had to ask my coworkers to write a text-logger for me, and then I read this information offline with Python.
Also, I cannot use Linux at all with the sensor, because there are not drivers for Linux, and I do not know where to start to "hack" the sensor, and that is why I am asking:
"If I were to try to read data from this sensor directly with Python and perhaps in Linux, what should I do first, or read first?"
EDIT: the device has an FTDI driver (FTD2XX.dll) if it helps.
Any help would be very welcome
The FTDI chips have a linux driver.  Just go to the FTDI website and download it. The driver creates a virtual serial port. You can use PySerial to interface with it.
Too bad I didn't see the post sooner!
Access USB hardware (pressure sensor matrix with native C++ API) using Python