I am designing a USB keyboard with special capabilities. What information can such a HID device receive from the host?
Can I via USB:
Read data from a form on the screen?
Find out what OS the user is on?
Find out if there's been an error message?
Even 'know' what's going on visually on the screen, i.e. what program is selected or whether the program is windowed or fullscreen?
Thank you!
The device can't get any of this information from a standard driver that the operating system supplies because that would be a security issue. It can receive any information that your own driver or application sends it. There are many ways to communicate with it - your device could present multiple interfaces (which will appear as separate devices), multiple endpoints, or use the control channel. You will definitely need to study the spec, and I also found this tutorial helpful.
I have done something similar and used the control channel to exchange feature data with a Windows application (over the standard Windows driver). On Windows, the API calls are HidD_SetFeature() and HidD_GetFeature().
On the device side, my hardware ran embedded Linux and I used the GadgetFS library to create a user-mode driver - much easier to debug than a kernel driver.
As others have said, you'll run into issues if you try this with a normal HID. However, there is a project called the USB Rubber Ducky. From their description:
The USB Rubber Ducky isn't your ordinary HID (Human Interface Device).
Coupled with a powerful 60 MHz 32-bit processor and a simple scripting language
The USB Rubber Ducky looks like a usb-device and is recognized as a HID, but is programmable. You can make a small script that will be typed onto the screen which will allow you to performs the queries you seek.
With the USB Rubber Ducky you can:
Read data from a form on the screen? Yes
Find out what OS the user is on? Yes
Find out if there's been an error message? Yes
Even 'know' what's going on visually on the screen, i.e. what program is selected or whether the program is windowed or fullscreen? Yes
If you aren't hoping to buy this device, at least their firmware is on github so it can provide you a starting point
Related
Is it possible to write an API with Python so you can connect a physical ON and OFF switch via USB to a PC and when user presses the switch to ON or OFF, the python program detects it and send a signal to a web app and shows ON or OFF message on the website?
I am sorry if what I am asking its not clear enough!
Yes, it is possible. Reading USB devices can be done with Python. In linux USB device inputs can be found in some files(e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0). By reading those files you can get the information that you need. Putting here link that will be helpful
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Firstly, you can't write an API to interact with hardware in python. You would have to use the pre-existing windows API(or the API provided by the Operating system that you are using) in order to interact with hardware in such a high-level language.
If you want to interact with hardware in python, and detect switch presses, releases etc, I would recommend you used a microcontroller such as a raspberry pi(for python) or an arduino(for C++). The respberry pi provides a very easy way to interact with hardware in python. If you still want to interact with a USB stick in python(but not acting as a switch) you can use the pyusb library.
I am a college undergrad studying computer engineering and trying to send signals using USB to an FPGA from a windows computer connected to the FPGA using usb. What commands can i use to output/input data from my computer?
For background:
I am working on a windows 10 laptop. I am using python currently to run a program that gets the data from the user. The data is literally just a set of binary bits (up to about 75 bits), our project is to do with encoding, so our fpga is supposed to take the data then encode it using block codes, then send the data back, then the data is to be slightly corrupted, sent back to the FPGA, then error checked and decoded and sent to the computer again. The FPGA we have is a Cyclone 5 (Model Number: 5csema5f31c6).
I have recently started taking an OS class and since the OS controls how hardware is used by programs, i assume my programs will need to issue certain commands to the OS which will then tell the USB to do what we want.
The answer depends on what specific driver you are using to talk to your device. If your device is just a generic USB device and doesn't fit into an existing category (like a keyboard or printer), then I'd recommend using the driver named WinUSB.
You would need to write (and sign) an INF file or use a technology called Microsoft OS 2.0 Descriptors to tell Windows that you want your device to use WinUSB.
After you've done that, you can use a Microsoft-provided DLL called winusb.dll which helps you send the commands that the WinUSB driver expects. You'd also need to use SetupAPI to find your device in the first place. Using those two Microsoft APIs directly can be difficult and it makes your code non-portable, so you might consider using a USB abstraction library like libusb or libusbp instead.
Is there any way in any Linux-based OS to access the instructions sent to have it transfer the instructions meant for the GPU to an external device connected via USB3.0 (and, obviously get the pixel output back)?
In Windows there is no native support for this kind of thing. Although many external graphics card exist which connect to a PCi slot, I didn't come across any USB ones.
Is there any way to accomplish this with native support of any of the Linux OSes?
EDIT: I was misunderstood, as far as I can see the comments. I want to program an external graphics card, I'm just looking for a way to get the GPU instructions to get to my device and get back the pixel array.
For a mouse, if I issue the command cat /dev/input/mouse1 and then move the mouse, there will be outputs in the console. From this I know that the mouse works.
But for the touchpad of my laptop, which is mouse0, I see no output when I issue /dev/input/mouse0 and touch the pad.
Then how do I know whether drivers of devices like my touchpad are really working? Whether they can really communicate with the operating system?
this depends upon how your driver wishes to communicate with the device and provide a response to you.
your driver needs to create a procfs or a sysfs interface like your mouse did.
so if your driver creates such an interface you can surely see but you have to look for them, sometimes they are not easy to find with their terminologies.
needless to say, they exist and they are communicating with your OS if they are working, but have they provided a procfs or sysfs interface, that is driver specific and could not be said just right away, some documentation or code would be required.
for Linux, there is a nifty little library called xbindkeys that (surprise) binds commands of your choice to certain key combinations.
I am looking for something similar, except for a system hardware event. When I plug in my headphones to the output jack on my computer, I would like to be able to call a program. It would also be nice to be able to bind to the event when I un-plug my headphones.
Does anybody know if this is possible? Maybe through some cool Python X11 library?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Found the API for the jack abstraction layer: http://www.alsa-project.org/~tiwai/alsa-driver-api/ch06s02.html
Sadly, this only allows for polling of the device, not an event handler.
You probably want to use udev for this. I haven't used libudev, but here's something I found:
libudev - Monitoring Interface
libudev also provides a monitoring interface. The monitoring interface
will report events to the application when the status of a device
changes. This is useful for receiving notification when devices are
connected or disconnected from the system.
The actions are returned as the following strings:
add - Device is connected to the system
remove - Device is disconnected from the system
change - Something about the device changed
move - Device node was moved, renamed, or re-parented
That article goes on to show how it obtains a file descriptor via udev_monitor_get_fd, which it later monitors via select.
Most modern Linux desktops (notably Gnome and KDE) use "DBus".
DBus, in turn, utilizes HAL (older) and/or udev (newer).
Here are a couple of links that explain further:
https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/peripherals/180950-udev
http://w3.linux-magazine.com/issue/71/Dynamic_Device_Management_in%20Udev.pdf
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html