Hi there,
I am also thinking of adding a small 1k resistor to generate some heat internally. There is just a little bit of fogging on the window really cold nights. But not enough of a problem right now to warrant a solution.
On the OC driver doubling as a Safety Monitor Driver. I am not sure that would work within the COM model. Sure, we could have the driver implement both interfaces, but the software package using it will have to know that both drivers are one and the same and hence not instantiate multiple instances (Because then you will have clashes on the hardware resources). And even if that was true, it will then have to cast the object or make SafetyMonitor calls on a OC object. This would break if someone is indeed using two separate drivers.
In fact if you look the OCH it does something similar, you can specify the driver for each sensor, but in the code it goes through the instruments to make sure it is only instantiating one instance of an object.
Just my 2c anyways. Maybe it can be done, but my initial feeling is that it is not, at least not in a scalable way.