Retrieve SD Card serial number on Windows XP/Vista/7? - winapi

There is a manufacturer's serial number on SD cards, and there are a number of pages on the 'net that describe how to retrieve it on various mobile devices (including this one). But I need to retrieve it under desktop versions of Windows, and the code that works for mobile versions of Windows doesn't seem to translate.
The question: how do you programmatically retrieve the SD card manufacturer's serial number from an SD card under desktop Windows?
EDIT: From what I gather, this can be done using the DeviceIoControl's IOCTL_SFFDISK_DEVICE_COMMAND to send command 10 from the SD Card specs, but it's unreliable -- it only works with certain non-USB card readers, and only with certain drivers for those readers. That makes it useless for our purposes. Maybe someone else can get some use from the information.

Well, you could do this using SetupDiXXX api calls (see this Code Project example) or if I'm not mistaken using WMI queries.
I'm not very versatile using WMI queries but I'm sure there's a ton of info on the net about it.
Using the SetupDiXXX methods you can query for present devices of a specific class (you would have to look up the device class for SD cards) and then enumerate through the devices present in the computer, reading the Manufacturer Serial number.
For reference on SetupDiXXX functions, see the following
SetupDiGetClassDevs
SetupDiEnumDeviceInfo
SetupDiEnumDeviceInterfaces

Related

Are NFC "writer" devices commercially available?

I'm looking into NFC for use with Android phones and the newest iPhones. What I'm envisioning is some kind of NFC "broadcast" device plugged in via USB cable to a computer, so that it always sends out the most up-to-date information to whatever NFC-enabled phone is within close proximity. So far I've been seeing a whole lot of NFC "tags," which I assume are rather stupid devices that are pre-programmed with essentially static content. I'm wondering if there are any USB NFC devices on the market that can be more dynamic. Do such products exist? What's the best search keyword to find such a device? (What I've been searching for thusfar hasn't been turning up a whole lot of results.)
"NFC "broadcast" device plugged in via USB cable to a computer, so that it always sends out the most up-to-date information to whatever NFC-enabled phone is within close proximity" is your requirement. As I see in market there are NFC Readers with USB plugin to computer. They are active NFC devices generating 13.56MHz and mostly used for payment purposes. However they are putting these devices to ticketing, Office ID applications. When you bring your NFC Phone within this reader's proximity, the reader will read your phone's data and shall send it to the computer as encrypted data and will be verified in your Computer. In this process, phone acts as passive device while reader is active device.
You can also control this reader using your corresponding Software in computer which you wish as dynamic writing.
I think this might help you http://www.acs.com.hk/en/products/3/acr122u-usb-nfc-reader/

Applications ignore USB device's incoming data packet while using default HID driver

I am writing a controlling software for a generic USB HID device within a team, working on Windows 7. Due to my status as an intern, my possibilities are limited:
the software must work on Windows
the software must use the default HID driver Windows supplies
My problem is that however I try to access the device while using the HidUSB driver (according to Zadig) my interrupt transfer read attempts always result with a timeout while the device actually does send data. Writing to the device works all the time, whether I use HIDAPI, whether I use libusb, only reading fails. (this is a primitive device atm and even the final packet data specification isn't done, currently it just sends an ON or an OFF string towards the host, and writing to the device changes the state of a LED between 7 colors and off state, so that one's certainly working)
I can't think of the device being faulty, because if I replace the driver on Windows to the WinUSB driver with Zadig, it works with libusb (and hidapi can't open the device thereafter) and on Linux, just by reading /dev/hidraw also returns the data fine. I have also read the HID and the USB specifications and I know that the device descriptors state that the USB packetsizes are 8, while the HID input report's size is capped at 20, tho I don't know what report ID the device uses.
Checking the Windows communications with USBPcap and Wireshark, the sole difference I can notice among the handling of the device is the host packets asking for data is filled with 00s against the HidUSB driver compared to the CCs when used with the WinUSB driver.
For the record, I have already tried libusb, hidapi, HidLibrary and noone within the team has an idea what to do now.
I have also read that Windows disables access to HID keyboards and mice but I found no actual example of a device config ending up as an USB mice. The Device Manager lists my device twice under HID tho, once as HID-compliant device or how it calls (localized Win7 here) and once as USB Input Device, but doesn't list it among the Mouse or Keyboard option.
Sorted it out a while ago, but I think I'll write it down here if someone ends up with a similar issue in the future.
The Windows HID driver invalidates any incoming packet if the report's data size does not match the length of the sent data iow the size within the report descriptor. Linux and the device itself didn't cared that's why I also ruled that out as source during the time I brought the question here. In the above example the on/off message being 4-5 byte vs the reported 20 byte length was the problem, now that the device sends 20B messages, all the solutions which could write via HidUSB can read as well.

Opening an FTDI device based on bus location ID

I have a few FTDI devices connected to my Mac. They all have the same description, PID, and VID. I want to be able to specify to FT_OpenEx() which one I want to open.
I can use the IO Kit APIs to get the bus location ID of the device I'm interested. The FT_OpenEX() API allows me to pass in a location instead of a description or serial number.
However, the FT APIs that return location IDs return values that look nothing like bus location IDs. One of the devices I have connected has a bus location ID of 0x1a127000, bus when I use the FT APIs to get the locations of all devices, it will say things like 0x1a051 and 0x1a052.
Is there any way to convert from IO Kit bus location ID and the FT location, or otherwise specify which device to use?
I recently had a similar problem: on some locations and devices I got 0 as location id. I wrote a request for assistance to FTDI and this is what I got:
We tested a USB 3.0 host PCI card found it not compatible with our
drivers for the following reason.
Existing host ports on a Windows machine are given a name in the
format: \device\usbfdo-# where # is a number.
The USB 3.0 card is known as a \device\device# where # is a number.
The USB 3.0 host port does not follow the standard naming convention
on a windows machine we do not attempt to open this port to send
device ID to when enumerating and trying to load drivers.
As we expect Microsoft to follow convention when they add support for
3.0, we expect the problem to go away from our point of view. As such we are still of the opinion the problem lies with the 3.0 host and not
our drivers.
Even if it was possible to make changes to support this host
controller it is highly probable that the next host device you try
(different manufacturer) will have another variant requiring a
different modification. This would not be a sustainable model and goes
against the PnP ethos of USB.
We believe this issue has been resolved in Windows 8. We are currently
working on the certification of our new windows 8 driver, I expect
this to be available by the end of February.
This is not very satisfying but at least it describes why it is not working. When I have time I will try to get the location id by using libusbX and then opening it with the FTDI API routines.
Not sure when that will be, though...
Veit
Since I already did this for linux once and have a working solution, I thought I'd try to figure it out for the mac as well.
I am not sure if I did this correctly but here's what I came up with:
Basically, you take the MacOSX location id right shift 16 bits, binary & with 0xff00 and add the device address.
That should be equal to the location ID you get from the ftdi driver.
Example:
In the "System Information" program I can find my USB device and see something like this:
Location ID: 0x14100000 / 21
That seems to be the "location id / device number".
Now plug it into that formula:
0x141000000>>16 = 0x1410
0x1410&0xff00 = 0x1400
0x1400|21 = 0x1415
So in decimal notation the location id is: 5141 which matches what FTDI returned. Note that 21 used above is 0x15 in hex.
I just figured this out 30 minutes ago so if there are problems with this implementation let me know. I need this to work reliably as well. I tried putting a hub between the mac and the device and the formula still applies.
The IOKit calls are:
kr = (*dev)->GetLocationID(dev, &locationid);
kr = (*dev)->GetDeviceAddress(dev, &address);
described at the apple developer reference website.
EDIT
since you have 5 digits in your FTDI location id, I would be interested in what your device device number is. Maybe my method doesn't hold up under your circumstances?

Replace Windows USB Class Driver with a custom driver?

I wonder if anyone can help at all, a bit of a specialist problem this.
I have an application that needs to read and analyse a number of USB devices (not simultaneously, they are each run in seperate tests and could in theory be run on different machines).
Each of the USB devices is based on the USB HID class, and are manufactured by different companies, none of these USB devices are designed to be run on PC, but are meant for a different platform, however for the purposes of testing the devices the client has requested that the test application is run from a PC.
Some of the devices will start up, be recognised by windows which will initialise and start them correctly using the generic HID class driver built into windows, the devices will then start sending correct data packets of the data to be tested.
Some of the devices will start up, be recognised by windows which will try to start them but fail to fully to initialise them leaving them in a half initialised state. This is fine, as I can use my beagle protocol analyser to capture the initialisation packets from the genuine platform and then use the LibUSBDotNet library to replicate the remaining packets in the initialisation sequence and get them to start sending the packets correctly.
The problem I have is with one particular device (though there are some more I haven't tested yet so it's quite possible one of those may also exhibit the same problem). The issue is the the Windows HID class driver recognises the device and trys to initialise and start it, this works after a fashion and the device starts sending data.
The problem is that the data being sent is different to that which is sent to the genuine platform (containing only a subset of the full data). It's as though windows has initialised the device into a different mode.
When I capture the initialisation packets from both the PC and the genuine platform using my USB protocol analyser I see that Windows is sending some slightly different initialisation packets. Using LibUSBDotNet to resend the correct packets once Windows has already started the device seems to have no effect.
My problem is that I need to stop windows from trying to initialise the device using the standard HID class driver, I've tried removing the driver in Device Manager but it still initialises it (and the driver is magically reassigned in device manager). I've done some investigation and there are possible alternatives:
Create a specific driver which windows will assign to the particular VID/PID of the device but that does nothing, then I can use LibUSBDotNet to send the correct initialisation sequence to the device from within my own code.
Use something like WinUSB to create a proper driver for the device (or possibly to create a "dead" driver like 1.
Will a driver with a specific VID/PID defined be used by windows in preference to it's inbuilt USB HID class driver? If not then I would be wasting my time going down this route?
Note, my mac initialises the problem device correctly, and I've asked the question of the client whether the application can be developed for Mac and their answer was frustrating Windows only.
I've no experience in writing proper Windows drivers, though I have experience in talking to USB at a relatively low level (so that part doesn't worry too much). Can anyone suggest a good course of action (before I potentially waste weeks investigating how to write drivers for the PC only to find my selected course of action can't deliver what I required).
Any help or suggest much appreciated.
Thanks,
Rich
Added after trying suggestions below:
I tried using the LibUsbDotNet inf wizard to create the necessary files and install them and this appeared to work - certainly the device was now appearing in Device Manager as a libusb-win32 device - not HID device and the associated driver was libusb driver. Even after doing this the device still seems to become initialised and start sending the wrong type of data packets although now those packets are no longer handled by the class driver and are just lost.
I also came across Zadig which has a similar inf creation wizard for WinUSB and this had exactly the same result.
A colleague has suggested that it might not be windows itself that is switching the device into this mode, rather the device identifying that it is connected to a windows machine and switching itself into this mode. I suspect this is the case, in which case I am stuck - time to have another conversation with the client.
Many thanks for the help.
You're using libusb-win32 as a filter driver; that is, the HidUsb device driver is assigned and loaded for your device, but then the libusb-win32 driver is loaded on top and gives you unobstructed access to the hardware.
If you don't want a HidUsb (or any other class driver) to perform any communication "on your behalf", simply associate libusb-win32 as a device driver with your hardware. For this, you'd have to create an .INF file associating it with the VID/PID/Revision of each USB device. If I recall correctly, libusb-win32 even comes with a utility to generate such .INF files.
If you install this .INF file e.g. with PnpUtil.exe (available on Vista or higher), you might still run into issues where, although you're a better match than the generic HID driver, the HID driver is still selected.
The generic HID driver matches devices by their Compatible IDs (i.e. by a USB interface class) while you'd be matching by Hardware IDs (which have higher priority). However, Windows might give priority to other aspects, such as your driver being unsigned. Read: How Windows Selects Drivers
Luckily, even in that scenario, signing drivers with a self-generated certificate (use CertUtil.exe, MakeCat.exe and SignTool.exe) is not too difficult.

Faking an RS232 Serial Port

I'm developing a project that has a number of hardware sensors connecting to the deployment machine through RS232 serial ports.
But ... I'm developing on a machine without an physical RS232 serial ports, but I would like to make fake serial ports that I can connect to and output data from with the aim of faking input from hardware sensors.
Does anyone know of a way to create a fake serial port and control it on Windows XP?
If you are developing for Windows, the com0com project might be, what you are looking for.
It provides pairs of virtual COM ports that are linked via a nullmodem connetion. You can then use your favorite terminal application or whatever you like to send data to one COM port and recieve from the other one.
EDIT:
As Thomas pointed out the project lacks of a signed driver, which is especially problematic on certain Windows version (e.g. Windows 7 x64).
There are a couple of unofficial com0com versions around that do contain a signed driver. One recent verion (3.0.0.0) can be downloaded e.g. from here.
I know this is an old post, but in case someone else happens upon this question, one good option is Virtual Serial Port Emulator (VSPE) from Eterlogic
It provides an API for creating kernel mode virtual comport devices, i.e. connectors, mappers, splitters etc.
However, some of the advertised capabilities were really not capabilities at all.
EDIT
A much better choice, Eltima. This product is fully baked. Good developer tech support. The product did all it claimed to do. Product options include both desktop applications, as well as software development kits with APIs.
Neither of these products are open source, or free. However, as other posts here have pointed out, there are other options. Here is a list of various serial utilities:
com0com (current)
com0com - With Signed Driver (old version)
Yet another place for com0com with Signed Driver (Pete's Blog)
Tactical Software
Termite
COM Port Serial Emulator
Kermit (obsolete, but still downloadable)
HWVSP3
HHD Software (free edition)
I use com0com - With Signed Driver, on windows 7 x64 to emulate COM3 AND COM4 as a pair.
Then i use COM Dataport Emulator to recieve from COM4.
Then i open COM3 with the app im developping (c#) and send data to COM3.
The data sent thru COM3 is received by COM4 and shown by 'COM Dataport Emulator' who can also send back a response (not automated).
So with this 2 great programs i managed to emulate Serial RS-232 comunication.
Hope it helps.
Both programs are free!!!!!
There's always the hardware route. Purchase two USB to serial converters, and connect them via a NULL modem.
Pro tips:
1) Windows may assign new COM ports to the adapters after every device sleep or reboot.
2) The market leaders in chips for USB to serial are Prolific and FTDI. Both companies are battling knockoffs, and may be blocked in future official Windows drivers. The Linux drivers however work fine with the clones.
Another alternative, even though the OP did not ask for it:
There exist usb-to-serial adapters.
Depending on the type of adapter, you may also need a nullmodem cable, too.
They are extremely easy to use under linux, work under windows, too, if you have got working drivers installed.
That way you can work directly with the sensors, and you do not have to try and emulate data.
That way you are maybe even save from building an anemic system.
(Due to your emulated data inputs not covering all cases, leading you to a brittle system.)
Its often better to work with the real stuff.
i used eltima make virtual serial port for my modbus application debug work. it is really very good application at development stage to check serial port program without connecting hardware.

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