USB Development Tools for Embedded Devices?

engywook asks: "I am thinking about putting a USB interface onto a real-time (home-brew kernel) embedded device, (naturally) with the intent that it talk to another device. I am thinking that it would be very useful to be able to monitor the USB traffic between my device and the other device, and between that other device and (say) a PC that already knows how to talk to it. Looking around, it seems that this capability is available, but at prices in the US$10K and up realm, which is a lot more than I can afford. I am looking for pointers to tools that would accomplish this for much less money. Any ideas would be appreciated! Thanks!"

Comments

Linux Journal #7605

[eburrows]

Last month's Linux Journal has an article titled "Snooping the USB Data Stream", where the author talks about exactly what you want. He talks about using Linux to monitor the data, but you can still use this method to monitor Windows talking to your device by running Windows in VMware.

Re:Linux Journal #7605

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to mod you up, but I thought I'd help out the lazy instead: link to the article. :-)

FPGA

[psyconaut]

Assuming that you're happy with USB1.1 and below, one approach is to use a low-cost FPGA (Altera Cyclones are great for this, and a suitable one is $20).

Zip over to opencores.org, grab the USB 1.x MAC and PHY as a starting point....and you can start to build your own hardware USB sniffer.

The beauty of this approach is that you can do *proper* sniffing type activities such as microsecond time stamping of samples, which gets (*ahem*) tricky doing things in the software domain under Linux or Windows.

If you just want to see a vague picture of the wire, you can stick to operating system level sniffing as others have pointed out.

-psy

Circuit Cellar

[FrankSchwab]

CircuitCellar just happens to have one part of a multi-part article on implementing a USB device up on their website here (Page 7, with other references). You'll probably have to check out your local university library or order backissues to get all the parts. They've had 3 or 4 similar articles over the last 5 years.

/frank