I have a USB web camera from ViMicro that contains a GPIO chip. We have a microswitch wired to one of the IO pins and can read the status of the switch on Windows using an ActiveX control that was provided by ViMicro, named exvmuvc.ax. I need to duplicate this functionality using IOKit on OS X.
USBTrace from SysNucleus displays the conversation happening between the Windows system and the USB device, but I cannot duplicate this on the Mac.
Does anyone know of a software USB sniffer, like USBTrace, that works on OS X so that I can compare the packets? Also, is anyone familiar with this particular camera chip and its GPIO subsystem, even on Linux?
You could use usbtracer from Xcode, or you can try using using USB Prober with a debug release of IOUSBFamily, this will most likely output more information than you actually want. You may want to look at qa1370 for more information.
In general though, I'd recommend you get a hardware USB analyzer, they make this sort of thing much easier.
Related
I am planning to write driver for USB or Bluetooth multi-touch device similar to Apple Magic Trackpad or Logitech trackpad for Mac.
The idea is that all macOS applications can use this multi-touch device. As the newly introduced DriverKit (or HIDDriverKit) is to be bundled with apps, should I still use IOKit or should I use DriverKit?
Thanks.
DriverKit is built around IOKit - it's just yet another interface to it. So I guess your question really is whether your driver should be implemented as:
A DriverKit System Extension (dext)
A kernel extension (kext)
Something else
You won't escape IOKit either way, because USB devices are only accessible via IOKit, and the HID stack is built on it too.
Bluetooth
As far as I'm aware, there aren't Bluetooth APIs for use with DriverKit, at least not yet. (As of macOS 10.15.4)
So if your device uses a custom Bluetooth protocol which needs to be turned into a HID event source from scratch, then I don't think you'll be able to use DriverKit, at least not exclusively.
If your device already appears to the system as a HID device but your driver needs to rewrite HID reports, then I think it might be possible to implement using DriverKit - at the very least it's worth researching.
Implementing it as a kext will definitely work for all cases, the trouble is any new kexts will have a very limited shelf life at this stage.
USB
For USB, it's more straightforward, there are direct DriverKit USB APIs. USB HID drivers are one of the well-supported scenarios by DriverKit. So you should definitely not use a kext to implement a USB HID driver targeting macOS 10.15+ at this point. In fact, if you did develop a USB HID kext, your users would periodically be presented with an awful warning popup.
"Something Else?"
That brings us to the "something else" category: you may be able to write the driver (almost) entirely in regular user space as a daemon using user space bluetooth and USB APIs, and then inject the HID events produced back into the system. The best way to do this might end up being via a DriverKit driver - so you'd have a user space daemon performing most of the driver logic, and a small DriverKit driver creating a "virtual" HID device which just ferries the events produced by the daemon into the HID stack. If you need to support older OS versions, the responsibility of the dext in this approach could be taken by a kext, with the daemon needing virtually no customisation to run on all OS versions.
If your driver will be doing a lot of complicated processing on the raw input data, this might be the way forward, as implementing such logic in a dext or kext isn't ideal.
To say which approach is best I'd really need to know a lot more about the device (and that might exceed the scope of a Stack Overflow question…).
I am newbie of Mac OS X.
Recently I have a task to develop a software which can
Enumerate thunderbolt devices.
Detects attachment/removal of thunderbolt devices.
I have found a sample program called 'USBPrivateDataSample' for USB in Apple's HP.
However, there's no sample program or any hint about thunderbolt.
I have the following questions:
Is it necessary to develop device driver to do the task I mentioned?
If question 1. is no. How to achieve this goal? Through IOKit?
How a thunderbolt device be presented in system? PCIe device?
Thank you very much.
You can monitor attachment/removal of Thunderbolt devices by Monitoring the I/O Registry for IOEthernetInterface entries. It’s relatively easy to filter out Thunderbolt networking (I’m not sure what the best option is, but an easy option is to look for “ThunderboltIP” in the “IOModel” property of the parent IOEthernetController).
I have achieved what you desire to do and also wrote a peice of code. Here is the link
Monitor changes on Thunderbolt port connection
May be this, helps you out.
I'm trying to create a virtual bluetooth keyboard client for Mac OS. that means my Mac will serve as a BT KB. I read about the bluetooth API in OS X (in ObjC), and I also found an HID API for Mac (in C)
To make this work I understand I need to declare an hid-keyboard-service that should be broadcasted on SDP queries.
if I declare an HID service using the HID API, is my service visible/broadcasted on Bluetooth too? (the documents seems to refer to HID with regards to USB only). - are HID services visible on both bluetooth and USB interfaces, and the underlaying connection is transparent to me?
is there any code that will help me with this you know about? I prefer ObjC, but it seems HID API is C only... :(
Thanks...!
As far as I understand it, a HID device driver represents a device locally to the OS, and by the OS, to various other components. It is not used to "broadcast" on USB nor on Bluetooth. As far as I know, OS X does not include a Bluetooth HID service, and neither does OS X nor the USB chipsets in Macs support USB device mode -- or at least they do not expose it.
You will want to write a Bluetooth service. I have not done that, but the documentation seems extensive. From what I understand, you would somehow have to implement your HID service based on the underlying Bluetooth L2CAP transmission protocol.
Since I have studied neither Bluetooth, nor Bluetooth support under Mac, I am unable to provide any more help. I did take a look at HID protocol specs, and even played with them. HID is relatively trivial to implement, but there will be quite a bit of work on implementing the Bluetooth service first.
It seems similar tools exist for linux and may have usable source code. See this thread for links.
We are creating small system which has GPS receiver and PC. We want to test my GPS receiver, We do not want to go for a driver on the first go. First I would like to test my circuit works or nor. GPS IC has been set to output NMEA sentence. We want a program which just reads data from USB port and print it on the screen.
Can we write something like this easily ? Do we have any open source tool which will achieve this purpose ?
Platform : Windows 7
All devices need a driver, so I'm going to interpret your question as "how can I read NMEA data from my GPS using only drivers provided by the OS, so I don't have to write my own?"
If the GPS chip has a USB interface, then you should have gotten a driver with it. But most GPS chips have a UART interface which in your case sounds like it is connected to a separate USB-UART conversion chip. That conversion chip most likely came with a driver as well, but if not, you could jumper the reset pin of the converter chip, disabling it, and then attach a TTL/RS-232 level converter (available off-the-shelf) to the UART traces and then to your computer's serial port.
Unless you suspect that the driver for the USB-UART converter is causing problems, I wouldn't bother.
Anything connected via USB is a device. Devices require a device driver, period.
You might be able to get away with an existing driver built into Windows. This is how USB memory keys work for example - they present a generic device that looks like a removable disk, and Windows already includes the drivers for generic removable disks.
You would need to check the documentation for your device to see if it can emulate a device which already has drivers. Otherwise you must install the company's drivers, or you're out of luck.
Have a look at libusb. You should be able to read the data with that and a little code. (Yes, it's a driver. I take the question to mean "without writing a driver".)
You need a device driver for your device. Unless Windows already have a class driver for the device.
For USB devices on Windows 7 you can write a user-mode driver, see UMDF.
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?