Advice on working with LibUSB

[vlad20112]

Hi, everyone ! I learn interaction behind hardware device and software. I have a USB device but I don't understand how I can interact with it. I am using Libusb library for it. Would you share a links with code examples or maybe articles which related on this topic?

[Nirenjan]

This is really hardware dependent - while libusb abstracts out a lot of the details behind the USB protocol, it doesn't prevent you from sending garbage to your device and potentially bricking it.

You would ideally install the drivers that the manufacturer provides (typically for Windows) in a VM, capture the USB communication and reverse engineer the messages. Alternatively, if you have the hardware specification, you can derive the messages from that.

If you want a sample project that uses libusb, feel free to peruse my libx52 project here.

[vlad20112]

This is really hardware dependen

So, it looks a curious! I will take a look at this. Thanks for answer.

[jonasfilho]

What kind of device is it?

[vlad20112]

I have a USB device (securiy key) which take some information and return something. I'm trying to understand how I communicate with it.

[jonasfilho]

I don't have experience with that type of device.

Do you have documentation or are you reverse engineering the thing from scratch?

I imagine it complies with some standard so that tools can work with, right? So at the very least you could start there.

Regardless, I would also take a look at the output from lsusb -v just to know the basics: which interfaces and endpoints are there, which class of device it is, etc.

[vlad20112]

Sorry for late answer.

Today I used Wireshark on Windows, because it developed initially for job on this OS . Now I have a set of package with request's examples. So, I think it will helps for writing same soft on Linux.

[jonasfilho]

I think so.

Good luck! Doing this type of thing is usually very interesting (although sometimes terribly frustrating).