I'm developing a device and writing the software for it under Windows (MFC with Visual Studio).
I would like to start a measurement with a remote. It would be nice if it worked over Bluetooth, but I don't have a clue where to start.
What book can recommended or is there a site where such things are described?
Is it even possible to make my own Bluetooth device or do I have to pay some fee for licences?
What I would like to have, is a Bluetooth-remote with one button, which sends a signal to a Windows PC where a program then starts specific subroutines.
As Dan wrote in the comment when it comes to Microsoft the best place to start is with MSDN. For me his link didn't work, but I guess he wanted to point here.
MFC does not offer you support for Bluetooth, instead you have to work with a Bluetooth driver stack API. On Windows there are more stacks, but most widely used are: Microsoft Bluetooth driver stack and Widcomm/Broadcom. If you decide to use the Microsoft Bluetooth driver stack you might want to look on this thread. The stack that you choose it depends on the Bluetooth dongle attached/incorporated at your PC.
Is it even possible to make my own Bluetooth device or do I have to pay some fee for licences?
Yes, it is possible to make your own Bluetooth device. The fee depends from case to case, first if you want to be assigned your own IDs from SIG you have to pay them a fee, otherwise you can use the ones already bought by the chip manufacturer. Also if you want to re-write the firmware from the chip you could be forced to buy a software from the chip manufacturer. Usually it's enough with their firmware.
What I would like to have, is a Bluetooth-remote with one button, which sends a signal to a Windows PC where a Software then starts specific subroutines.
Well, it seems you will have to take care of the device discovery aspect and second make the pairing. After this you could use Serial Port Profile to communicate with your device like any other RS-232 enabled device. If your device is dedicated you might want to modify the IAC - Inquiry Access Code so in discovery phase only you that you know the code, can see the device.
Related
I am looking for a piece of software, or assistance with where to start for coding, that will let you select a USB device and convert its output signals (when buttons are pressed on the device) into keystrokes or configurable macros.
In more detail, I have this remote control (more accurately, a USB handset/phone) that sends USB signals depending on which button is pressed and the software I currently use converts those signals into keystrokes or macros. The software I currently use however is extremely limited, non-configurable and obsolete. The software which I retrieved from the CD that the device came in is simply named 'USBPhone 5 in 1' however there is no mention of this anywhere on the internet.
The device is unfortunately unbranded and also has very little visibility on the internet so I cannot see if there's any updated software or even any way to edit it.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I think you need to start by getting basic understanding of the USB standard and device classes. Then you need to find out if your device implements a specific device class or some proprietary interfaces. Then you will either need to use a driver for the device class or implement a proprietary driver.
While USB is abbreviation from Universal Serial Bus, it is not transferring some random analogue data but well defined digital packets. The standard defines Audio Class for audio devices, Video class for video devices etc. Most devices implement one or more of those classes. For keyboards and mouse it defines HID class, which is most likely what your device implements. You can find HID device class related specifications here. It is not the most simple one to begin with, but it should work when you just plug the device to your PC and open e.g. notepad and start writing. USB device class codes are listed here.
In order to find out what device class your device implements, you need to read it's descriptors. In Windows one of the easier ways is to use usbview. You can read more about USB decriptors from here.
You do not mention what is your USB host (Windows or Linux PC, Mac or something else), so I am not going to go into actual USB driver implementation, but hopefully I was able to give you some information on what could be needed. In any case, if the device has some proprietary implementation, you will either need to have specification for it, or reverse engineer it by monitoring the USB packets. There are lots of expensive hardware solutions on the market for analyzing the USB traffic, but there are also some free SW solutions that might be good enough for your purpose. Quick Googling brought up this.
You can try joyToKey, this software do exactly what you want but with gamedpad. I don't know if it will work well with your USB controller.
http://joytokey.net/en/
I need example of code (or some tutorial) for making virtual HID (Human Interface Device).
If possible with bluetooth integration and made for linux using QT/C++.
Practically, I want to make my own cellphone application which will have few buttons (but it will work as keyboard - sending keystrokes), without requiring server-side application (it will control windows/linux/mac operating systems), and HID seems to me best choice. Unfortunately, I can't find any code samples or tutorials for that.
The thing is I don't know how I am supposed to make service and register it (make it available over bluetooth so OS can recognize it as keyboard and pair with it).
So far I have found about BlueZ, but as I mentioned, I cant find any code samples or tutorials.
UPDATE: I am trying to make my cellphone (Nokia N9 - Maemo 6/MeeGo OS - Linux) to pretend as HID device via BlueTooth so I can send keystrokes to PC.
The first question that comes into my mind is this usb device made by you ?
I don't understand what making my own cellphone application means . So you have a device that is a cell phone or what please be more explicit
Anyway a solution for you might be the libusb library works very well on both windows and linux machines.
If you need to study about usb hid devices and how to interact with them you can find a lot of very good tutorials here.
Please be more explicit in order to help you.
I am new to hardware programming(especially USB) so please bear with me and my questions. I am using C++ and I need to send/receive some data (a byte array) to/from a USB port on a microprocessor board.
Now, I have done some serial port programming before and I know that for a serial port you have to open a port, setup, perform i/o and finally close the port. I am guessing to use a USB port, it is not as simple as what I mentioned above.
I do know that I want to use Microsoft standard drivers and implement standard Windows IO commands to accomplish this, since I believe there are no drivers for the microprocessor board for me to interact with.
If somebody can point me in the right direction as to the steps needed to "talk" to a USB port (open, setup, i/o) via standard Windows IO commands, I would truly and greatly appreciate it. Thanks you so much!!
USB in a nutshell is excellent background reading.
For a generic USB module try LibUSB which includes some examples of talking to standard devices. LibUSB-Win32 is the windows port of that library.
You're right though, it's nowhere near as simple as an RS232 port.
What microprocessor are you using? Does it come with any USB hardware or are you thinking of trying to implement it all in software (not something I'd recommend even contemplating!). A lot of microprocessors come with code samples which can emulate simple HID USB devices like keyboards / mice etc. which you can use as a starting point. Failing that, there's probably a few off-the-shelf options which will save you a lot of headaches :-)
Find out the USB chipset used on the microprocessor board, e.g. Ftdi, Cypress, etc. These manufacturers supply drivers, libraries and example programs for the comms, this is the easiest way.
There are no 'standard' drivers as such unless your board is set up as an HID device, however if you are using Windows, Microsoft supply a WinUSB.sys 'generic' driver which may or may not meet your needs (it doesn't support Isochronous transfers).
Should you write a driver for the USB device that will attach itself. If you know the type of chip that has the USB i/o on the board, the driver will be for that device.
There may already be driver's for that chip if it is an STM or there may be an API to help develop drivers for it. It would probably be a custom device but you should look through device types to see if there is an existing type that matches your device. If so there may also be a driver already for it which you can use. Information about the board is necessary.
WRITE YOUR OWN DRIVER
With out getting too far into it, you should learn Microsoft's driver model, the difference between user mode and kernal mode drivers, what driver node's represent, driver hierarchy and how they logically attach themselves, different types of drivers (filter, function, bus), how kernal driver's communicate with user interface, dynamic link libraries, frameworks and API's, WDM framework/API, KMDF and UMDF API's and this is just a short list.
OR you can use an existing driver.
USE USB MICROCONTROLLER SUPPLIED DRIVER
We do not know what firmware the USB microcontroller is using, if any. If there is no firmware (if say the chip came with out it or relies on eprom to store it and not flash) then if we knew if the chip supports usb bootloader, you can flash it or load it's firmware through the USB and there is no need for JTAG or other peripherials. Likely the usb alone is capable of getting you off the ground and anywhere from there. Typically these types of questions arise when considering board's with out a USB microcontroller.
Here is a link to a slighly related driver. Most USB microcontrollers serve the purpose of switching USB communication to UART as most microconrollers that actually do the thinking and control everything are not equiped with USB i/o but instead UART or some other i/o pins like I2C or SPI etc..
https://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBXpress.aspx
That driver may actually work, if not something similar but for the manufacturer of your USB microcontroller; will almost certainly do the job. Hope this helps.
By hardware programming, do you mean you will be programming the microcontroller? If so, there is no way you will use "standard windows drivers" or anything like that.
The USB standard is very thick. Check it out here
It is a very involved topic and I recommend finding USB implementations already created for your microcontroller. (which we may be able to find if you gave us more info)
What kind of microprocessor and what kind of board?
Many processors come with support for USB ports. Also, some hardware boards come with USB contollers too.
For example, the processor that my shop is using comes with two USB controllers that can act as a hub or as a device. We're even adding another processor to act as a USB controller.
I want to develop code to transmit data from system to PIC through USB.
Can anybody give good link regarding data transmission through USB.
because i am new to this.
NOTE: Very simple is code is enough to me.
Thanks in Advance
The PIC16F877 does not have a USB peripheral built in. I assume that the product that you are building is a "USB Device" and that the "system" that you are referring to will provide the USB host functionality. If this is the case then you will have to add a USB interface chip to your hardware to provide async serial to USB connectivity. Suitable devices are made by TI (TUSB series) or FTDI. You then connect one of these to the PIC internal USART and pretend that you are transferring the data over a simple serial port. If you are using a pc then the connected device will appear as a standard COMn: port.
I totally agree with the FTDI route, however if you're not looking for a UART tunnel over USB then you have to get a bit more in-depth.
You'll have to write the USB routines yourself or find libraries/projects for your processor. What you will definitely have to have is a fast clock - 12MHz is necessary More is better because on small uC's like these you'll spend most of your time just handling the basics of USB - signaling and so forth. You'll also need a fair bit of memory because the USB code takes up around 1.5K I think. Then you need room afterwards for your own code.
I've seen the V-USB (http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html). It's for AVR not PIC, but it says it provides all of the USB functionality you'll need and even provides vendor and product IDs for you to use (non-commercial I believe). There's also a PIC project for USB that doesn't run on the same hardware as yours here: http://www.alanmacek.com/usb/
To make the driver you'll have to use libusb - here's a link for the win32 version: http://libusb-win32.sourceforge.net/
It's surprisingly more simple than I had expected, but I just looked at example code and not actually made anything. Good luck!
As your task will involve Windows Device Driver development, I do recommend to downlaod and install the WDK and look through the contained sample USB drivers.
This might get you some hints about the complexity of the topic. Device driver development is not the easiest thing to start with.
Maybe you can start with UART communication (RS232).
check http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/pic16f876.gif will surely help u
also
ttp://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb7.htm , type h in front of 2nd link.
I am trying to connect to a single USB device using the USB host port on an Atmel processor. I have an embedded system with limited memory and no OS. I want to implement a simple dedicated host to interface to a single USB slave device.
Can anyone guide me to a simple USB host implementation?
The processor is the Atmel AT91SAM9261S.
First of all if i remember correctly AT91SAM9261S have OHCI usb controller on board and you need to implement at least simple host controller driver (you can take a look on Linux implementation) . Depending on the transfer types your device will be using it might be not very hard - to very hard :) There is no trivial way to implement usb stack.
After implementing a controller driver you will need to take care usb device enumeration part take a look at Chapter 9 of USB spec. And only after this you can start implementing your device logic.
For simplified use case there is a lot of code that could be omitted, but without good usb background is hard to decide what is relevant and what is not.
Any way if you are looking for commercial solution my company can provide one.
I've used the RTUSB-32 stack from On-Time. It is a small foot print stack and was easy to integrate into our environment and the documentation is good. They abstract out nicely the needed support so that it is completely platform and OS neutral and has a relatively small number of hooks you need to provide to it - ie: It is well encapsulated.
Since you get all the source, you'll see that the code is not the most well constructed code in the world, certainly, but it can be deciphered without a whole lot of work if needed. In any case, it basically "just works" without issue. We have had it running in some products for a few years now and have only run into one compatibility problem with the stack where it wasn't quite doing auto-discovery quite right with a certain type of USB 2.0 hub. We sent them a sample of the hub and they had a patch for it within a few days. Hard to beat that. Overall, I consider it a good value and certainly beats sitting down to write the thing from scratch.
This would be so much easier if your device didn't have to be a host :-P, because Atmel provides example source code for USB devices. If I were you, I'd look into using one of the USB-loving RTOSs on Atmel's AT91SAM third party page which might entail the USB stack from jungo as suggested by Ilya.
If you do write your own OHCI driver, libusb could be helpful as an implementation of the upper layers of the USB stack.