I bought a new mouse (which doesn't have it's own software) and I was wondering:
Since it has RGB lights that change on their own, as far as my understanding goes, it has some software inside it that controls this.
First, the simpler question: when I first connect the mouse, Windows says it's "installing" some stuff. Where can I find this stuff (files probably)?
Second: Is there any way for me to "reverse engineer" this and get access to the mouse's code, so that I would be able to control the LED's color, for example?
When Windows says it is "installing" something for your mouse, it is looking at the USB descriptors, figuring out what driver to associate with the mouse, and recording other metadata. You can look in your registry under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB" to see what gets recorded. For a more complicated device, I think Windows could actually download driver files from the internet during this stage and install them on your computer. But for a standard HID mouse, it should already have the drivers it needs.
There is no standard way to read the code from a hardware device, and it is likely to be extremely difficult if the device is not open source. The code is likely stored in the memory of a microcontroller that has read protection enabled, meaning that it cannot be read from an external programmer. It is also possible that much of the funcitonality of the mouse is actually implemented in application-specific hardware instead of software.
If there is existing software on your PC that allows you to control the LED color of your mouse, your best hope is to run that software and look at what USB packets it is sending to the mouse using a USB protocol analyzer.
Related
Why would the file system (CIRCUITPY) of an Adafruit board running CircuitPython not show up when connecting it to a suitable host via a micro usb cable?
This happens to me often, usually when I am copying files via Windows, most often with my trinket which uses the integrated chip flash memory rather than the separate SPI flash chip. Why? I don't know. A bug somewhere obviously. :)
So the solution.
Always save your work files locally or use a source code solution like git
Switch to the boot mode (double click reset)
Drag the erase.uf2 file to clear the flash memory
Drag the circuit python uf2 file to reflash python
Restore your files saved on your PC
Basically, I've made it a habit to assume the flash memory is temporary and volatile and not store any critical code only there.
You can read more about the erase uf2 and reflashing, general troubleshooting here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/welcome-to-circuitpython/troubleshooting
Besides your first answer about the cable, because of the relatively inexpensive nature of the boards and direct access to their power/ground sometimes the EPROMs that the file system are hosted on just go bad and give unexpected results. Best idea is to:
Test your environment with another board.
Reflash micro python on your board so you can start from scratch (didn't mention if you'd tried that).
JerryN mentioned the most common cause of this is using a USB cable with no data wires. Some USB cables are designed for power-only and have 2 rather than 4 conductors. These will power the device but will prevent mounting of the drive and use of the serial connection over USB.
Unfortunately these cables are often not marked as power-only so can be difficult to spot.
Another case is where CPLAYBOOT (this varies per board, e.g. GEMMABOOT, FEATHERBOOT, TRINKETBOOT) disappears on Windows. This can be caused by installation of the Arduino software which has an old, conflicting driver from 2007. More information on Adafruit: Circuit Playground Express: Troubleshooting.
A very rare case is a mis-seated USB connector. In my case the power was ok but the data wasn't for a good quality cable which had previously worked fine. Unplugging the USB cable at the host end and re-inserting it solved the problem.
I am working with a simple PIC18F2550 and I'm wondering about how to get a bootloader working on it. It's a very simple device with a USB port and CDC firmware. When I download Tiny Bootloader onto the pic, my PC doesn't recognize the device. Do I NEED to have a USB controller in my circuit in order for it to work? Such as the MAX232?
Would the same apply to the PIC32MX795F512L?
Thanks!
It is clear from the Tiny PIC boot loader documentation that it expects a UART connection rather than USB (that is what the MAX232 is for - it is an RS232 line driver).
You could simply do that and use an external serial to USB converter thus saving the code space required by the USB-CDC stack. Otherwise you will have to modify the boot loader code to use the CDC driver rather than the UART.
You will have to link the USB code with the boot loader, which will no doubt significantly increase its size. You may need therefore also to move the application start address to accommodate the boot loader. Furthermore, if the application needs USB comms, you may need a separate copy of the code in the application unless you provide a method of accessing the bootloader code from the application; which is possible, but not necessarily straightforward.
All that said, note the part at the end of the end of the page about extending the bootloader; On the face of it it seems unsuited to extension. Without looking at the code and its memory map, it is not clear why it has this constraint.
The PIC18F2550 has a USB interface built into it. It is called the "USB SIE" and there is a large section in the datasheet that documents it. If you make the right electrical connections, you should be able to connect your PIC18F2550 directly to a USB port without any active electronics between them. There is no reason you would need extra USB hardware just because you want to run a bootloader.
If you want to troubleshoot your problems with the bootloader, you should probably post another question with more details. It could be a problem with the PIC's configuration bits or something like that. I recommend trying to modify the bootloader to get it to blink an LED as a basic first step just so you can verify that you were able to get its code to run at all.
I am a physicist, and I had a revelation a few weeks ago about how I might be able to use my personal computer to get much finer control over laboratory experiments than is typically the case. Before I ran off to try this out though, I wanted to check the feasibility with people who have more expertise than myself in such matters.
The idea is to use the i/o ports---VGA, ethernet, speaker jacks, etc.---on the computer to talk directly to the sensors and actuators in the experimental setup. E.g. cut open one side of an ethernet cable (with the other end attached to the computer) and send each line to a different device. I knew a postdoc who did something very similar using a BeagleBone. He wrote some assembly code that let him sync everything with the internal clock and used the GPIO pins to effectively give him a hybrid signal generator/scope that was completely programmable. It seems like the same thing should be possible with a laptop, and this would have the additional benefit that you can do data analysis from the same device.
The main potential difficulty that I foresee is that the hardware on a BeagleBone is designed with this sort of i/o in mind, whereas I expect the hardware on a laptop will probably be harder to control directly. I know for example (from some preliminary investigation, http://ask.metafilter.com/125812/Simple-USB-control-how-to-blink-an-LED-via-code) that USB ports will be difficult to access this way, and VGA is (according to VGA 15 pin port data read and write using Matlab) impossible. I haven't found anything about using other ports like ethernet or speaker jacks, though.
So the main question is: will this idea be feasible (without investing many months for each new variation of the hardware), and if so what type of i/o (ethernet, speaker jacks, etc.) is likely to be the best bet?
Auxiliary questions are:
Where can I find material to learn how I might go about executing this plan? I'm not even sure what keywords to plug in on Google.
Will the ease with which I can do this depend strongly on operating system or hardware brand?
The only cable I can think of for a pc that can get close to this would be a parallel printer cable which is pretty much gone away. It's a 25 wire cable that data is spread across so that it can send more data at the same time. I'm just not sure if you can target a specific line or if it's more of a left to right fill as data is sent.
To use one on a laptop today would definitely be difficult. You won't find any laptops with parallel ports. There are usb to parallel cables and serial to parallel cables but I would guess that the only control you would have it to the usb or serial interface and not the parallel.
As for Ethernet, you have 4 twisted pair with only 2 pair in use and 2 pair that are extra.
There's some hardware that available called Zwave that you might want to look into. Zwave will allow you to build a network of devices that communicate in a mesh. I'm not sure what kind of response time you need.
I actually just thought of something that might be a good solution. Check out security equipment. There's a lot of equipment available for pc's that monitor doors, windows, sensors, etc. That industry might what your looking for.
I think the easiest way would be to use the USB port as a Human Interface Device (HID) and using a custom built PIC program and a PIC that includes the USB functionality to encode the data to be sent to the computer and in that way be able to program it independently from the OS due to the fact that all mayor OS have the HID USB functionality.
Anyways if you used your MIC/VGA/HDMI whatever other port you still need a device to encode the data or transmit it, and another program inside the computer to decode that data being sent.
And remember that different hardware has different software (drivers) that might decode the raw data in other odd ways rendering your IO hardware dependent.
Hope this helps, but thats why the USB was invented in the first place to make it hardware and os independent.
I have been given the following project to do:
create a program that runs on computer 1. The program will simulate mouse movements and pass that information through a usb cable from computer 1 to computer 2. Computer 2 must believe the information being passed to it is coming from a mouse-device.
Basically computer 2 has to believe that a mouse is connected to its usb-port, when actually it is another computer (computer 1), and computer 1 basically simulates mouse movements. Which movements the computer simulates doesn't really matter because that would probably be the easy bit, the harder bit is actually making the software that makes that possible.
QUESTION: Is there any program that currently does that? If so please tell me which one it is. If there isn't any program you know of, how would I go about making it myself?
PS: I would assume that this project is theoretically possible. I mean the computer 1 would just have to send signals to computer 2 that are similar to the normal signals sent to a computer by an ordinary mouse.
The ability to act as a USB host as well as a client (keyboard, mouse, etc.) is not typically part of the USB chipset in PCs. The ability to serve either role requires something unique like USB OTG; which you can find in some mobile phones.
So no, this is generally not possible with two random PCs and a USB cable. In any case, you can find a discussion on this here:
Emulate USB Device with USB Host
The thread mentions that you could make a proxying device with active electronics in it to sit between two host-only devices and be capable of translating to appear as a client to one. But with just a plain old USB cable you can't.
Since you're so specific about wanting it to be done with USB and no need to install special software you are probably not interested in something like Synergy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)
...but someone else finding this question might be.
I have Windows 7 64 Bit Professional Edition on a computer I built myself so there is no manufacturer to ask. I am using an on-board sound card which has 7.1 and Optical outputs. The optical output is plugged into a Denon amp which controls the speakers.
I have got a speaker system plugged into my computer through the optical port on my sound card. When I use standard windows drivers I only get stereo output so I installed the Realtek HD audio driver. This gives me surround sound successfully however it does not tie this as a standard speaker so when I plug in headphones and define them as headphones nothing happens the audio still goes to the speaker system and nothing to the headphones.
I have discovered that if I disable the Digital output device in the playback devices list the audio is automatically rerouted through the headphones. Therefore I have been trying to find a way of disabling or enabling this device. I have a programmable keyboard so I can map a program or script to a spare key therefore I am trying to write a program to check if the device is enabled or disabled then change this to whatever it is not i.e. if on turn off and if off turn on.
I attempted to locate the hardware IDs which are1. "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601"2. "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601&REV_1000"
I had planned to create a batch script using devcon (the command line alternative to device manager.) using the below code to disable or enable the device
devcon disable "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601*"devcon enable "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601*"
However devcon fails to disable these devices as the optical connection is on the sound card and I can only disable the entire sound card which would also disable the headphones.
I am a little lost as to what to do now and I really don't want my brother to need to play with disabling devices.
I am open to any suggestions. I am happy to use any language to do this. Im sure there must be a way of doing this from c but I have been unable to locate any information on this. I would appreciate any suggestions. I am quite happy to write the program myself but if someone could at least point me in the right direction to an api or something like devcon or some way in some language to do this. I currently know VB6, VB.NET, VB Script, Java and Batch Scripting and Powershell quite well and have some knowledge of C, C++ and C#.NET.
any and all help would be appreciated
Kind RegardsDexter
You can try with this :
devcon /r disable #"HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601*"
devcon /r enable #"HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_105BA601*"
Regards,
Pal