I already read Creating a Virtual USB Device and Virtual USB device about creating a virtual USB Device. I am familiar with the Plug and Play handling by Windows as well as the driver mechanism.
So far I understood that first of all I would have to create another device driver which is used for the virtual USB device. But I am still lost on the point what actually is the virtual device. How would I control the behaviour of my virtual device?
Background: I develop a software which acts as a communication layer between an API and the USB driver. The behaviour of the USB device is well known to me. I even could provide the whole firmware. For reasons of QA, I would like to test my software without the bugs of the whole system or on the other hand easily implement errors to see how the software reacts. But what kind of software could implement this behaviour as virtual device?
Any documentations / instructions are welcome!
I used the USB/IP project to emulate USB devices in Python. Maybe it can help you to create your virtual USB devices:
http://breaking-the-system.blogspot.com/2014/08/emulating-usb-devices-in-python-with-no.html
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I have an "off the shelf" commercial software using an ANT USB dongle to communicate with a cycling trainer.
My trainer is not compatible with the software because the protocol is slightly different (not a lot).
My goal is to write a protocol translator. The only thing I can think of is to write a UMDF virtual device driver (like Magic ISO Virtual DVD) looking like an ANT USB Device in the device manager (same PID\VID) while connecting itself to the physical ANT device. The virtual device driver will perform the protocol translation.
I looked at several examples from Microsoft here https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-driver-samples but I was unable to find anything relevant. I thought this example would be a good start https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-driver-samples-master/Sensors/CustomSensors but it is impossible to load the driver using the given procedure from the inf file.
BTW I am familiar with the content of INF files and the basics of KMDF & UMDF device drivers programming. My problem is to write something that will load in the device manager and present itself as a real USB device even if it is not enumerated by the USB bus subsystem.
Can anybody with driver development experience point me to some relevant code sample or documentation?
Best regards !
I am currently developing a UMDF CCID (smartcard reader) driver. This project helped me at the beginning because it compiles out of the box and creates virtual device nodes (smartcard readers) visible in the device manager.
I'm investigating options available for creating a virtual USB device (say, a keyboard or a mass storage device), so to emulate its function as needed and to allow a userspace app to emulate its insertion/removal at will.
What I am not clear about is how to go about the emulation of insertion/removal. It seems that one option is to emulate a (virtual) USB hub and have it fake the device arrival/departure events (and I would also supply the device driver for my virtual USB device and that's where my device logic will reside).
I know my way around Windows kernel (having written NDIS miniport drivers), not afraid of SoftICE, but USB is not my domain, just starting out with it.
Am I on the right track with the virtual hub approach? If so, is developing virtual hub drivers supported by WDK (it doesn't seem to be)?
Any other options?
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(Edit) Forgot to mention - I am aware of DSF, but it is not supported on W8.
Am I on the right track with the virtual hub approach?
In short - yes, I was right.
That's how USBIP does it and it's a relatively simple way to go. Also, see this comment by Eugen.
I don't know if you are aware, but Microsoft released to Win10 the UDE (USB device emulation).
In the section Write a UDE client driver they describe exactly what you want.
I build video cameras with a Linux kernel on a TI Davinci dm365 board.
This board supports RNDIS drivers so my camera can be "plug and play" in windows. This is some kind of "Ethernet over USB" network adapter.
Windows load the RNDIS driver usb8023.sys to interact with my hardware.
When I have more than one camera plugged-in, Hell breaks loose and I get a lot of problems, sometimes all my USB ports stop working but most of the time, one of the two cameras stop working.
I've tried importing old drivers, copy usb8023.sys and load a separate driver for each cam with no luck. I've checked and double checked my ip settings.
I downloaded new version of the drivers from Texas Instruments and recompiled everything. I think that the problem was that the gadget pc had OTG (on the go) enabled, which allows it to switch between host and device mode.
It is likely the USB serial numbers for each of the video cameras is identical. Windows in general handles this situation very poorly.
You need to adjust the USB descriptors on each device to be a unique ID.
I'd like to modify a USB driver to send and receive USB data over a network.
Take for example, an iMac and a PC. I have an iPod plugged in to my PC (in NY). I want my iMac (in LA) to recognize the iPod as plugged in to a local USB port and be able to communicate with the iPod.
Forget my qualifications, or lack thereof (I have background in web, iOS apps, I've toyed with Java and C).
Where can I get source code for a USB driver for Windows that I can modify? Mac OS?
Any tips or pointers towards accomplishing my goal would be appreciated as well.
It looks like folks are coming up with something close to what you want. If you do decide to roll your own, the USB driver source you asked for is libusb.
On the Mac OS X end, drivers are built up in a stack. What you want to do should be relatively simple (nothing is really simple in kernel land). You need to create a driver that can communicate over ethernet with the PC and looks like a USB device to the driver matching software. Then everything else will happen automatically.
The source code is available for Apple's USB stack. You should also read about the IOKit API and IOKit device driver guidelines and IOKit fundamentals.
Oh yes and you say you have toyed with Java and C. To write device drivers on OS X, you'll need to learn some C++.
I suggest you to go see USBIP project. This is available on Linux and Windows, but not clear for MAC. If you can get a VHCI-Controller driver installed for MAC, we can kick start USBIP for MAC.
Sounds quite like this product, a bit unsure if theirs works over wide-area networks though.
I have a general idea of how I'd go about it, but not any specifics. Basically, I'd use the platform's driver development kit to write a USB device emulator on the client machine. I'd then add a virtual device to that system called "Networked USB Host", or something similar that maintains an open port to listen for communication from the server and passes it on to your virtual USB device. IIRC, the Windows DDK comes with a USB simulation framework that might be able to help you with this.
On the server, you'd have to hook into the USB subsystem to send raw USB packets to the client machine. libpcap and wireshark have USB capturing facilities for that, but I'm not sure if this works with winpcap and the Windows version of wireshark as well.
EDIT: Look at this for cross-platform USB capture alternatives.
You can buy OSR USB learning kit: https://www.osronline.com/custom.cfm?name=index_fullframeset.cfm&pageURL=https://www.osronline.com/store/index.cfm
This is actually small USB device with known interface. Windows Driver Kit (WDK) contains sample KMDF driver for this device: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/wdk/
This is good starting point to learn Windows Drivers development, and USB drivers development specifically. However, it is still far away from your problem solution.
Can't you use some sort of Remote Desktop?
I need to create a application that will allow a Windows PC (XP/Vista) to emulate a thumbdrive. That is, when the PC is plugged into either another Windows system, or in this case, a piece of hardware that allows for USB thumbdrives to be plugged in, a folder on the computer looks like a giant thumbdrive. Any thoughts on where a guy would start to investigate this?
Update (more specific description):
I need to connect my PC to one of the newer multifuction devices that support scanning to a USB thumbdrive that is inserted into the front of the device. These units do not support WIA or TWAIN via the rear USB connector that you'd typically use for connectivity to a PC.
Most USB controllers in regular pc's dont have the possibility to function as an USB slave. So I'd start with investigating what kind of hardware you're going to use.
Another way to go: there are USB Link cables to link up 2 pc's over USB, maybe that's usable for you?
You cannot do this in an application. At the lowest level, the USB ports on your computer are controlled by an Host Controller Interface. This chip will manage up to 127 slave USB devices. You would need to seriously reprogram this chip before it implements the slave side of the USB protocol. Of course, at that point any USB hub in your PC will break down - those 8 USB ports you probably have are usually implemented by 2 smart USB hubs connecting to both USB1 and USB2 host controllers. Next, your USB keyboard and mouse will stop working.
Take an MCU with two Slave USBs. Write a simple frimware which makes one USB act as a Special Device Class and wait until PC on this USB provides mandatory data (including Device Class, of course) for the other USB. Write a PC program which connects to the Special Device (your MCU), uploads Mass Storage Device Class and redirects I/O to a dedicated partition. The other USB on the MCU will become an emulated Mass Storage Device.
Some of those code can be taken from Linux.