I'd like to use WebUSB to read and write files to a flash drive, or better, write arbitrary bits like unix's dd. Is this possible, or is only serial-like communication supported?
It cannot. USB mass storage devices are claimed by the system's generic USB mass storage class driver and are therefore unavailable to the browser.
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Is it possible to use the BB as Mass Storage Device?
I want it to be connected to an audio player that can read files from USB connectivity (such as USB flash drive) and act as data storage device containing one specific folder (and its sub-folders) from the file system (if possible, on a flash drive connected to the board.).
As the device specs says, it has connectivity of:
USB client for power & communications
USB host
Operating system will probably be Ubuntu but can be changed.
What drivers or configurations needs to be done in order to achieve this?
The latest images have already the mass storage usb gadget active, so a mass storage peripheral should be recognized by your system upon connection.
A quick google search reveals this discussion about a user trying to disable the USB MS gadget:
From the discussion, the files where the magic happens are:
Debian: /opt/scripts/boot/am335x_evm.sh
Ubuntu: /opt/scripts/boot/am335*
Armstrong: /usr/bin/g-ether-load.sh
In my Debian image the line you want to modify is:
modprobe g_multi file=${gadget_partition} cdrom=0 stall=0 removable=1 nofua=1 iSerialNumber=${SERIAL_NUMBER} iManufacturer=Circuitco iProduct=BeagleBone${BLACK} host_addr=${cpsw_1_mac}
and the corresponding $gadget_partition variable that is set just before that in order to customize the folder you want to expose.
Note that the g_multi gadget in its standard configuration presents 3 different devices: an ethernet interface, a mass storage peripheral and a serial interface. If you want to customize the parameters you can refer to the g_multi documentation (kernel.org)
I have a special bespoke device with a USB interface. When plugging in the device to my laptop - Ubuntu 12.04 it mounts as a read only USB drive - with a file on it. This file is created by the device and writes to the file when the device scans stuff.
I however, want to be able to write to the drive so the device 'thinks' it has already scanned x amount of entries.
Basically I want to replace the file 'File1.txt' my version of 'File1.txt' however I cannot because the drive is mounting as Read only.
I have tried the following commands:
andy#andy-ThinkPad-W530:/media/iRead$ touch giveme.txt
touch: cannot touch `giveme.txt': Read-only file system
andy#andy-ThinkPad-W530:/media/iRead$ sudo mount -o remount,rw '/media/iRead'
[sudo] password for andy:
mount: cannot remount block device /dev/sdb read-write, is write-protected
andy#andy-ThinkPad-W530:/media/iRead$
Can anybody suggest anything I can try to mount this as writable drive?
I have a very strong feeling that the chip which is storing this data is the following:
ARM STM32F103 RBT6 22oUP _ 93 MLT22950
Hope this helps somebody to help me!
If processing write commands coming from USB wasn't part of the requirements, it's very unlikely that the device processes write commands.
A read-only USB mass storage device is not a read-write mass storage device with write-protection slapped on top. It's a USB device that doesn't have logic for understanding write requests at all.
After the device is finished and delivered is a little late for deciding
I want to be able to write to the drive so the device 'thinks' it has already scanned x amount of entries.
Of course the flash memory used inside the device is written during its operation. But the way data is stored inside might not look anything like its USB presentation, and the conversion is most likely one-way only.
Since the developer probably did not implement mass storage support from scratch, and the library they used probably has write support, they may be able to easily supply you with firmware modified to be writable and do something with the written data. But without changing the firmware, you get nowhere.
Is it possible to get a list of files from an SD card when it is connected as a USB Mass Storage device?
UMS provides the contents of the SD card as a raw storage device, much the same as a hard drive or CD driver. As such, it is up to the operating system's VFS to make sense of the partitioning, formatting, and directory structure contained on it.
I'm researching ways to communicate with a USB device in Linux and would prefer to not write a Linux Kernel driver. I understand that libusb exists and is a user-land library that would work, but our embedded device doesn't support usbfs ( and would be really a pain to change kernels to add the support ).
So my question is basically this: Is it possible / advisable to communicate with a USB device by directly reading and writing to the /dev/USB or the udev file corresponding to the USB device thus bypassing the need for a custom Linux Driver and usbfs?
I'm hoping it's possible to communicate using the USB devices protocol just by reading / writing protocol packets directly through file-type read/write commands once the /dev/USB or udev device file is open.
Thoughts and suggestions please.
FOLLOW UP:
Since the USB device I needed to talk to is a USB HID class device, I was able to use libudev and the standard Linux USB HID RAW driver by reading / writing directly to /dev/hidraw0 ( or the appropriate /dev/hidraw device ). It wasn't necessary to write a custom driver for a simple USB HID device.
Jim, I don't think you can escape the need to write a driver and just manage to read the USB file in /dev. Because who defines as to what should happen when you do a read() on the USB device file? And who defines what action should be initiated when you invoke sysioctl()? Your driver! In other words, the device files are themselves incapable of anything until they are supported by the underlying drivers. In fact, you can treat the device files to be an abstraction of the underlying driver! So, no driver, no use of device file :(
I suggest you go through the following articles about how to write a driver and also understand the USB internals-
http://www.linux-usb.org/USB-guide/c15.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4786 ( Slightly outdated )
I am wondering, do you need a specific device driver to read a usb device in Linux, or should it just be able to be read. If I connect my cell phone or iPod touch to my linux box, it is not found is /proc/partitions and thus is not a mountable device by fdisks standards, though gnomes nautilus does in fact mount the iPod but not the windows mobile touch pro cell phone.
So I am interested, If I just wanted to read a device(iPod touch) in linux, how can I do so. How can I get a hold of a descriptor of a set usb device so I can read it.
Thanks all.
You can access raw USB endpoints under /dev/usbdev. There is user-space libusb that makes it easier.
Unfortunately there is no simple concept of "just read it" for USB devices (I am assuming that you are not referring to reading and writing the data on the USB bus that make up the USB protocol). In short, you always need a device driver for accessing a USB device and it is up to the driver to implement "the abstraction" of the device used by the system (disk, serial device, etc).