I'm trying to develop a USB board that can connect to the computer as a HID device and talk to a Python application I'd write. I want to use Python and I went with a HID device to be driver free.
This seems like a great solution until I ran into lilbusb-win32. After working with it for a bit it looks like I have to create an INF file for my USB device. I've read that the INF recognizes the USB device's IDs (VID and PID). Wouldn't this mean every single device would need to ship with its own INF file basically negating the idea of being driver free with HID in the first place?
Would Libusb-win32 and PyUsb allow me to create a program to talk to any board as long as they were all the same HID devices (just having different product id's)? If so, do users need to download the INF with my program?
This seems to defeat the purpose of going with HID in the first place.
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I have 2 identical USB-to-serial adapter cables (pretty much like this one) to connect a desktop PC under Ubuntu and some RS232 devices.
I develop a python software to pilot these devices.
I need to find a way to identify which one of the 2 adapters I am connected to.
I know about python's serial.tools.list_ports.comports() function, but all the settings are the exact same for both adapters (see capture below). Except the device, but it may change depending on the plugging order.
How can I change some settings' field to make both adapter pythonically distinguishable? Is it possible to write my own serial_number for example?
To solve this problem there are some alternative paths to serial devices in Linux.
There's either
/dev/serial/by-id/ and /dev/serial/by-path
variant to access your devices.
If this is always for a specific serial device, the normal way to do this is to use the udev program to create symlinks for you in /dev. There's a lot of different options for how to do this, either based on what physical port it's plugged into or based off of attributes of the device(e.g. serial number).
FTDI based devices all have a serial number associated with them, but since yours is a Prolific they don't have a serial number, so this becomes a bit harder. However, since we can use udev to create a symlink based on where it is plugged in, something like the following should work(put this in a file seen by udev, e.g. /etc/udev/rules.d/80-my-converter.rules):
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", KERNELS=="2-1.8.3", SYMLINK+="device_1"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", KERNELS=="2-1.8.1.3", SYMLINK+="device_2"
The KERNELS parameter will have to change depending on where exactly you plug the serial device into and will be specific to your system. You can get a list of the udev parameters on your device by running the following:
udevadm info -a -n /dev/ttyUSB2
This page has more information on writing udev rules.
I may be confusing a few concepts here so any help is appreciated.
Q1: Is it possible to attach any sensor in the world to the USB on my computer as long as it gives me analog data, and read its output? (e.g. pH, temperature, oxygen sensor etc as long as it gives me analog data)
Q2: If so, then what is the simplest way in python for me read such data.
Comment: I am trying to bypass using PLC's, and trying to see if I can get the output from the sensor directly to the PC. (I do not have drivers for these sensors)
Actual Need: I have an oxygen sensor connected to my computer via a USB. The oxygen sensor is able to send out analog data. The obvious way is to go through a PLC. However, I would like a solution which by-passes PLC's so I can connect the sensor directly to my PC via USB.
The USB port on your computer cannot read analog data because USBs work with digital signals. You would need an analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
as #digitaLink answered, it is not possible directly via USB and yes, the obvious way is to use a PLC.
I would go the PLC way - in fact, I did it a few times in the past - and start with an Arduino and later develop a custom PCB, put it in a box and done.
Another possibility is to use a raspberry pi (or similar SBC), which has the GPIOs you can use for analog read.
Edit: there is another possibility.
The sensor you use now is _very_likely_ a PLC in itself, that is, the sensor is attached to a microcontroller that uses the USB port for serial communication. Now, the drivers you are missing do nothing else but decode the data coming through the serial port. Take a look inside your harware and try to find out what components there are in.
So what you could do is to try to find out how to communicate with the sensor via a serial terminal. It is probably possible to monitor serial communication (although I must admit, I don't know how to do that), reverse engineer the code and write your own driver in python. You could learn a lot from this, even if you don't succeed.
I would like to know if the following is possible:
I want to connect my computer to either another computer, or a some consumer electronics (like a ps3 or xbox or something), via a double sided USB cable. I want to run a program on the first computer that will run a constant data stream through the USB cable, to trick the second computer into believing it is a usb flash drive, and it can read data from it. The first computer can change the data stream accordingly to the files that are supposed to be on the emulated flash drive.
Essentially, I want to use a program on a computer to mimic USB hardware in another device.
I don't know if I am wording this is a proper way or not, but is this possible?
Diagram:
| My Computer running this program | >-----emulated USB data stream-----> | Target |
This isn't possible without special hardware because USB doesn't support peer-to-peer networks. You might do better with Firewire (IEEE-1394), which can at least be used for TCP/IP with appropriate drivers.
I'm connecting a several identical USB-MIDI devices and talking to them using Python and pyportmidi. I have noticed that when I run my code on Linux, occasionally the MIDI ports of the devices are enumerated in a different order, so I send messages to the wrong devices. As the devices do not have unique identifiers, I am told that I should identify them by which USB port they are connected to.
Is there any way to retrieve this information? My app will run on Linux, but Mac OS support is useful for development.
It's annoying because they usually enumerate in a sensible order - the first device in the hub is the first device in portmidi, but sometimes they don't - usually the first 2 devices are switched. I have to physically move the devices without unplugging to fix them.
lsusb should do the trick. All devices and their respective hubs are listed there.
I am using an RS232 Serial - USB Converter to connect to a controller. I am trying to connect to this port programmatically.
The device is getting listed as below when I give lsusb
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 05ad:0fba Y.C. Cable U.S.A., Inc.
But I am not able to see it's device path (something like /dev/ttyUSB*).
I would like to know the way to get the path from device id (or) a way to create / find the path which can be used to open the port from a program (Ruby, Python, C)
Centos has a fairly old kernel. It may be lacking in support for your device.
Are you able to try with a newer distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc) to test whether it works or not? Failing that, do you have a different dongle you can use?
You can Google for "Centos 05ad:0fba" or similar combinations to find out whether it's supported.