I am wondering whether it is possible to display a message to the user when he connects a USB device. For example, I want to program the USB so that any PC that the device is connected to displays the pop-up window, saying Please leave the usb on this place.
It is NOT possible;
You wrote: " I want to program the usb so that any PC that the device is connected "
You'd rather program the PC not the USB
USB is a storage device only. Unfortunatelly you can't program all the PC's that USb might get into
The ONLY way this might be (yes it won't work in every case I guarantee) be tweaked is to have autorun.inf file in the USB pointing to a program on the USB that displays the message you want.
[Autorun]
Open=msg.exe
Due to most modern operating systems have tons of blocking mechanism to stop autorun programs this message has very slight chance to appear
You will need to first register for device notification. Then, you can implement a callback to detect when your USB device is inserted or removed. Within that callback you can do your messaging to the users based of your inspection of which device was inserted or removed.
This is only possible if the computer already has a driver installed for this device that implements this behavior. If, as I suspect, the device is actually a standard USB storage device, this is not possible.
Related
I am designing a security utility for USB sticks that when a memory stick has been plugged in,an email is sent to the user with the computer's name and IP address. I have got the email part working, but do not know how to execute the .exe file I have made when the USB is plugged in. I know autorun.inf hasn't worked for a while now, and I would like it to run automatically regardless of the PC it is plugged into. Any suggestions? Thanks.
I am pretty sure there is no way to store an executable onto a USB mass storage device in such a way that it runs automatically on all Windows PCs, because that would be a security risk.
You can configure Windows to use AutoPlay though: go to Settings > Devices > Autoplay.
If you have control over the firmware of the USB device, you might try emulating an HID keyboard and taking control of the user's computer that way. See BadUSB and USB Rubber Ducky.
I have an usb device (pole display), which i don't have driver for.
I installed generic usb driver and opened the port for sending(I use bulk transfer) data to device.
With usb monitoring software i see my data gets to device, but nothing much happens on device side.
The device commands(ESC/POS) work when transfered over (virtual) com port, but not over usb port.
Shouldn't device process commands the same way regardless connection type (com vs usb)?
How can i figure out what commands work with the device (for example, if i send some text, i want it to show on display)?
Any help is appreciated!
Look at the USB descriptors the device reports in order to determine its class. If it is a custom device and not a standard class then you'll likely not be able to work with it. There is a big difference between old RS-232 COM protocol and USB. USB devices can have multiple configurations and endpoints, each responding to data in different ways. Many classes exist and are pretty standard (CDC-ACM is typically used for virtual serial ports.) However, it's not uncommon for device manufacturers to include OEM specific configurations and endpoints which can be used for their own custom interfaces, firmware loading, etc.
Is there any initialization data transmitted through the COM port when connecting the device? The device surely can treat COM and USB different, but another possible thing that goes wrong is that the device needs to hear some sort of "I'm going to start sending commands"-signal from you first, and that signal may be different between COM and USB.
So what I would recommend is first (if you have not done that yet) see what data is sent to initialize the COM connection, and if that doesn't have an obvious USB counterpart, connect it to a PC where you do have drivers (assuming that is available somewhere and somehow, which is possible if e.g. you ask this due to OS incompatibility) and see how the connection is initialized there.
If the first doesn't work and the second is unavailable to you, then I'm afraid there's little I can do to help you, since it's usually not visible for you what commands the device wants to hear other than by guesswork, documentation, or comparing to similar devices where you do have that data available.
Is there any way Not to detect USB from windows PC?
The USB device should not mount on windows PC ,It should be handled by my application..
Suggestions please...
As far as I know there is no way of stopping the mount on the windows PC, however, you could set it up to autorun so that when it is plugged it in attempts to launch your application. This answer has some information on how to do this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/255067
There is also the option to hide a drive in windows by removing is drive letter (http://www.howtogeek.com/97203/how-to-hide-a-drive-in-windows-so-that-no-one-will-know-its-there/) however, this is almost certainly going to stop your application from reading it too.
If this is for a specific security reason then perhaps you could look at encrypting the drive and allowing only the application to decrypt the data. Thus, whilst mounted in windows it will be of little use.
Sorry I couldn't be of much more help.
Microsoft provides a utility called devcon for free download.
It's a "Command Line Uility Alternative to Device Manager".
It can actually do many things that I won't get into here, but removing a plug & play device is a simple operation once you know the unique name of the device you want to manipulate.
Refer this to check how to work with it.
It sounds like you don't want your device to show up as a drive in My Computer. In that case, why are you using the Mass Storage Device class at all? You could make a custom, vendor-specific device and talk to it using control/interrupt/bulk transfers with WinUSB. You would need to change the Device's USB descriptors to indicate it is a vendor-specific device and not a mass-storage device.
Do you know a way to use the Windows XP API to reset the USB bus? In other words, I'd like the OS to kick out any USB devices that are currently connected, and then auto-detect everything anew.
I'm aware of devcon, and I suppose I could do system calls out to it, but I'm hoping for a direct call into the API.
From kernel mode: You can force a specific USB device to be re-connected, as if it was unplugged and replugged again, by sending an IOCTL_INTERNAL_USB_CYCLE_PORT to its PDO. (This can only be done from a kernel mode, e.g. through a helper driver.) This 'cycle' operation will cause a USB reset to occur, after which the device would be re-enumerated. For example, if the device comes back with a different USB device descriptor, a different driver may be matched for it.
From user mode: You can do this by ejecting the device through the CfgMgr API. For example, to go over all USB hubs and eject all devices:
Find all devices having device interface GUID_DEVINTERFACE_USB_HUB with SetupDiGetClassDevs(... DIGCF_DEVICEINTERFACE).
Enumerate over the returned device information set (SetupDiEnumDeviceInfo).
For each device, get the DevInst member:
Invoke CM_Get_Child(DevInst) and then CM_Get_Sibling repeatedly to go over all child nodes of the hub (i.e. the USB devices).
For each child node, call CM_Request_Device_Eject.
Well, use can use the Setup API (SetupDiXXX functions) to enumerate the USB devices in the system, and then call WinUsb_ResetPipe on each one, but I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. It's been a while since I worked with USB devices, but as I recall, there is no standard way to reset a device (i.e. simulate a power off/power on cycle). If it's possible for a particular device, you'd have to send an appropriate IOCTL (using DeviceIOControl) to the driver. The IOCTL would vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.
It's possible to cycle the parent port on the USB hub the device is attached to, as well. This will result in, among other things, apparrent unplug/replug actions, as you will see a balloon popup when this occurs.
Much of this is poorly documented, and honestly, I've gotten the impression there are only a handful of people at Microsoft who really understand it well. The design decision I've made for future devices I design is that I intend to include watchdog functionality on both sides, as well as a device-side full reset function. That way, if the device figures out it is confused, it can just cut its own power for a second and fully reset, if the host can't communicate with it, it could do the same thing, and if the device thinks everything is fine but the host knows better, the host could order it to reset.
There are at least three APIs worth looking into for this problem: the Setup API, the Config Manager API, and various WMI extensions. However, be cautious about diving into WMI if you intend to use an Embedded XP target, as you will have to include a lot of other things in your OS image you might otherwise not need.
As far as I know, there is no way to do this - you can issue a command to have PnP rescan the bus for new devices, but that isn't the same as issuing a bus reset.
Furthermore, just because from a hardware perspective you issued a bus reset doesn't mean that Windows will remove the PDOs that represent the children of the hub and redetect them; the USB bus driver can (and does) do just what I describe (i.e. issue hardware bus resets without disturbing the device tree), and only after the device doesn't respond does it issue the surprise removal and yank it from the tree.
I'm looking for a very specific USB device for debugging systems that may use USB but not with a regular computer (proprietary hardware). I want a device that has a USB host controller and two USB device connections. The device to be debugged is connected to the USB host controller and one of the device connections is connected to another device with it's own host controller on it. The the other device connection is connected to a pc. The point being that all USB data travelling through the device (from the device connected to the host controller to the device connected to the first device connection) is reported to the pc.
I'll happily write software to do the logging (in fact I want to) but I can't seem to find a board like this anywhere. Can anyone help?
I have an Ellisys USB analyser, which isn't exactly what you describe internally, but does sit between a peripheral and a host and use a separate PC to collect the data.
(i.e. it has two 'B' and one 'A' connectors on it.)
Excellent product, and very helpful company.
Sniffing the USB shouldn't be too hard if you have the right hardware. And that is the tricky question. I haven't seen anything that describes the USB breakout box that you want. However I can say that this is in the realm of the following two magazines:
Nuts and Volts
Circuit Cellar
If they don't have a USB breakout box project in their archives, then at least they will have advertisements for small cheap single board computers that would have multiple USB ports that you can use for buffering the signals and reporting it back to your PC.
Alternatively is it possible to just wire your PC up to the middle of your two devices and write a custom drive that echos data back and forth while sniffing off a stream for you?
Sorry for the long delay in my reply -- I checked out one of our USB developer's toolchain, and he uses a Beagle USB Sniffer. He seems happy with it.
You're looking for a USB device with two upstream outputs. I think according to the USB spec, this is not possible. You will have two USB hosts trying to send messages and control the USB devices at the same time.
What if you were to look for a device which allowed you to view the data going through a hub via something other than a usb output?
If you're building something custom, take a look at this USB chip site. The chips are programmable via a windows application. Once you define how you want it to operate, it's saved on an EPROM on the dev board ($30-$50).
Sorry if this isn't helpful!