More and more iOS developers who are required to rely upon a device specific identifier for their applications switch from [UIDevice uniqueIdentifier] towards the usage of the device's network card's MAC addresses.
This seems to be the commonly accepted solution if you don't want to or cannot use a GUID.
I can also see, that everybody is checking for the network device with the ID "en0".
Can anybody answer:
What is device en0?
Is it available on all iPads/iPhones?
Is it available if airplane mode is on or the device is not connected to a network?
I found this question UIDevice uniqueIdentifier Deprecated - What To Do Now? but it does not really deal with the details as I'm asking about.
What is device en0?
Personally I always assumed it means ethernet network, e.g. Linux uses eth0 and BSD-derivates, like OSX, seems to prefer en0, but I could not really confirm it. That's something you can change in most operating systems (but not on iOS, unless jailbroken).
FWIW other people seems to assume the same but I don't consider this a definitive answer. OTOH it should not really matter much ;-)
Is it available on all iPads/iPhones?
AFAIK. Reporting this should be an operating system (not a device) feature and there are no network-less iOS devices (at the moment). I don't have old iOS versions to confirm if it has always been available or not.
Is it available if airplane mode is on or the device is not connected to a network?
Yes, it's available in airplane mode using the NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces () API. Tested with my first gen iPad.
Related
I work with an embedded device that has a USB host port. I would like to connect an iPhone to it and communicate via USB. I have done development on this and ported the functionality to connect to usbmux on the iPhone and have successful communication, however there is another problem.
All development was done with the iPhone connected to a powered USB hub that was connected to my device, as soon as I connected it directly, after enumeration it starts to drain the battery of my embedded device and causes a tension (voltage) drop that causes my device to turn off.
I know that after enumeration usb devices can draw up to 500 mA from the usb port, but I was wondering if there was a way to limit that to 100 mA (while still having the iPhone registered).
I found various questions regarding controlling voltage on the data pins or vcc from the usb port and I understand that's not possible, I'm looking for a software solution (although hardware solutions are welcome).
tl;dr: Is there a way to supply the iPhone with less than 500 mA after enumeration? Could I do this in software? Or do I need a hardware solution? I don't want to turn the port on/off, just limit the power draw of the iPhone.
NOTE: I am using Windows CE 6.0, if it is something that can only be done by modifying the drivers, or having direct access, there is no problem.
P.S. also, if there is a way to do this in *nix (or some other open source OS) that I could look at the source code and port it to Windows CE please let me know.
When a device shares its available configurations (see USB chapter 9), it specifies how much power it requires for each configuration. The host should look at all the available configurations and choose which one it wants.
In practice, however, these things don't work so smoothly.
The last time I looked at this, Windows always chose the first configuration. MacOS always chose the lowest power configuration (or highest, I can't remember). I never looked at WinCE or Linux.
If you're writing/modifying the driver, you can set your own rules for which configuration to choose, including looking for one that's 'self powered'. The iPhone, however, might only have one descriptor that always requests 500mA, bus powered. If so, then you're pretty much screwed since there's no way to let the iPhone know it's not OK to draw power.
That being said, I believe all the iPhone accessories are actually USB host (as opposed to USB device), and given that they don't always supply power, the iPhone must be capable of enumerating self powered.
I like the answer by Russ Schultz but I want to add another one:
No.
The descriptor of the peripheral device, iPhone in this case contains bMaxPower. If you enumerate this device, you also accept the power demand. It is not possible to only supply less, lets say 300 mA, if you already enumerated the device with the 500 mA desriptor. If this is what you wanted.
If the device provides multiple configurations, you are as mentioned by Russ free to write a driver which selects the configuration with less power. Hopefully, the device will then only consume the granted power.
Many peripheral devices just don't care. Most devices only provide one configuration with 500 mA. And there are a lot of devices which just consume more than they say ...
I have a Lindy IRDA USB bridge attached to my Xperia Neo (Cyanogen Mod 9). I have changed the features to support host mode etc. All is looking fine in the code. I detect the device. I can see the interface and the two endpoints (one in, one out), however as soon as I try to claimInterface it fails, regardless of whether I atempt a force claim or not.
There appears to be no simple way to find out why the claim fails. Though strace gives me a clue as the ioctl call for claim interface fails with a device not found error.
Ignoring the failure gets me only as far as the request which then fails to queue or send.
The questions I have are (I think):-
What exactly is missing that is resulting in the claim failing?
Is there a way around this that ideally would not require root?
Is there a way to override the claim somehow?
OK, so I appear to have fallen into answering my own question here, but I see that a number of people are getting confused over the apparent support for USB Host and the "odd" behaviours that can be observed so hopefully this answer may help some of you out.
I posed 3 questions, I have a definitive answer for 1 & 3 but I am less certain about the other at this stage.
1) What exactly is missing, and why does this result in a bad claim?
The problem is that the device, a lindy IRDA dongle is being detected by the host (my Xperia Neo handset) but that the only configuration that it supports is demanding too much power for the handset to support.
Oddly, this does not prevent either a) the device from being detected and enumerated by the Android libraries or b) from it appearing to be powered (red LED glowing)
There is no report at the time of the failing claimInterface() call from any system libraries, however a dmesg|tail running when the device is attached gave the necessary insight.
dmesg | tail
<3>usb 1-1: device v066f p4200 is not supported
<6>usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=066f, idProduct=4200
<6>usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
<6>usb 1-1: Product: IrDA/USB Bridge
<6>usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Sigmatel Inc
<6>usb 1-1: rejected 1 configuration due to insufficient available bus power
<4>usb 1-1: no configuration chosen from 1 choice
Further investigation showed that this little device was claiming a requirement for 440mA which seems rather a lot but there seems little that can be done about it.
Questions 2 Can anything that does not require root be done to work around this?
It seems not. In theory I could provide external power to the device through the use of a USB Y cable or similar hackery but I don't believe that that would change the underlying problem that the handset refuses the demand. Even with root it is not clear that anything can be done to override the power profile.
Question 3, is there a way to override the claimInterface() failure and force the communications?
This is a blunt no. The device has simply not been created by the kernel so there is nothing there to override in the first place. Which does make it somewhat puzzling as to why the Android libraries still offer it up.
As to Question 2 and power demands...
Most android devices that support Host/OTG that I have run across, will only support a maximum current draw of around 100 mA. Could you force it to work via some kernel source hackery? Likely, but you would run a very real risk of burning up the USB support circuitry in your android device. This is because the Boost converter that such devices use to power the external usb device only physically support that maximum 100 mA current draw.
Could you use a Y-Cable to supply the needed current externally? Yes, I have done this before on a device that had no boost converter, but you would then need to have a workaround in the kernel to tell it that you had such external power, and that it was now okay to power the device up.
Is it possible to program a wireless adapter attached to a computer?
I need to modify how they work, not just using them to perform a task such as scanning or connecting.
I have already tried the Native Wifi API, but that library is too high level. I cannot modify how exactly the wireless adapter works.
Any solution in any programming language in any operating system is very welcomed. (Sounds so desperate lol)
You need an open-source operating system then. Hardware varies in how programmable it is, but for example, Atheros wireless cards do not have an on-board processor, and therefore they do the absolute minimum of the 802.11 protocol in hardware, leaving everything else to the device driver. More info in these places: http://linuxwireless.org/ http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-testing.git;a=summary;
If you really need to go further that what commodity hardware can do, look in to GNU Radio and the USRP/USRP2: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio
And yes, you do have to be careful about the legal implications of this stuff, but then if you don't turn off the regulatory framework, there is software to help with that.
Generally speaking, the manufacturer will attempt to prevent you from doing this. Since what you're working with is really a radio transceiver, its operation is regulated. In the US, for example, such things fall under the purview of the FCC. Depending on the country, changing how it operates (and then operating it) is likely to be illegal.
If you have an atheros chipset on your WLAN card then load up linux and install ath5k/ath9k or madwifi and you can do some interesting things with the driver.
I have been tasked to write a device driver for an embedded device which will communicate with the micro controller via the SPI interface. Eventually, the USB interface will be used to download updated code externally and used during the verification phase.
My question is, does anyone know of a good reference design or documentation or online tutorial which covers the implementation/design of the USB protocol stack/device driver within an embedded system? I am just starting out and reading through the 650 page USB v2.0 spec is a little daunting at the moment.
Just as a FYI, the micro controller that I am using is a Freescale 9S12.
Mark
Based upon goldenmean's (-AD) comments I wanted to add the following info:
1) The embedded device uses a custom executive and makes no use of a COTS or RTOS.
2) The device will use interrupts to indicate data is ready to be retrieved from the device.
3) I have read through some of the docs regarding Linux, but since I am not at all familiar with Linux it isn't very helpful at the moment (though I am hoping it will be very quickly).
4) The design approach, for now at least, it to write a device driver for the USB device then a USB protocol layer (I/O) would reside on top of the device driver to interpret the data. I would assume this would be the best approach, though I could be wrong.
Edit - A year later
I just wanted to share a few items before they vanish from my mind in case I never work on a USB device again. I ran into a few obstacles when developing code and getting it up and running for the first.
The first problem I ran into was that when the USB device was connected to the Host (Windows in my case) was the host issues a Reset request. The USB device would reset and clear the interrupt enable flags. I didn't read the literature enough to know this was happening, thus I was never receiving the Set-Up Request Interrupt. It took me quite a while to figure this out.
The second problem I ran into was not handling the Set-Up Request for Set_Configuration properly. I was handling it, but I was not processing the request correctly in that the USB device was not sending an ACK when this Set-Up Request came in. I eventually found this out by using a hardware USB protocol analyzer.
There were other issues that I ran into, but these were the two biggest ones that took me quite a while to figure out. The other issue I had to worry about is big-endian and little-endian, Freescale 9S12 vs USB data format (Intel), respectively.
I ended up building the USB device driver similar to UART device drivers I had done in the past. I have posted the code to this at the following URL.
http://lordhog.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/usb-drive
I tend to use structures a lot, so people may not like them since they are not as portal as using #defines (e.g., MAX3420_SETUP_DATA_AVAIL_INT_REQR 0x20), but I like them since it makes the code more readable for me. If anyone has questions regarding it please feel free to e-mail and I can try to give some insight to it. The book "USB Complete: The Developer's Guide" was helpful, so long as you knew what areas to concentrate on. This was a simple application and only used low-speed USB.
While writing a device driver for any interface (USB, Parallel port, etc...) the code needed to be developed would depend upon whether there is any Operating System(OS), RTOS running on that Processor/Micro controller.
e.g. if thats going to run say WinCE - It will have its own Driver development Kit , and steps to be followed in the device driver development. Same for any other OS like Linux, symbian.
If its going to be a plain firmware code(No OS) which is going to control the processor/microcontroller, then it's a different situation altogether.
So based on either of the above situation u are in, one needs to read & understand:-
1.) The Hardware Specification of the processor/micro controller development board - Register files, ports, memory layout, etc.
2.) USB spec
3.) Couple of pointers i found quickly. Google shud be ur friend!
http://www.lrr.in.tum.de/Par/arch/usb/usbdoc/ - Linux USB device driver
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/wce/support/usbce.mspx
-AD
I've used an earlier edition of USB Complete by Jan Axelson. Indeed very complete.
From the editorial review:
Now in its fourth edition, this developer's guide to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface covers all aspects of project development, such as hardware design, device firmware, and host application software.
I'm curious, why did you pick the 9S12? I used it at a previous job, and was not pleased.
It had lousy gcc support so we used Metrowerks
which may have been okay for C, but often generated buggy C++
had a lousy IDE with binary project files!
The 9s12 was also slow, a lot of instructions executed in 5 cycles.
Not very power efficient, either.
no barrel shifter, made operations that are common in embedded code slow
not that cheap.
About the only thing I dislike more is an 8051. I'm using an ARM CortexM3 at my current job, it's better than a 9S12 in every way (faster clock, more work done per clock, less power consumption, cheaper, good gcc support, 32-bit vs. 16-bit).
I don't know which hardware you're planning to use but assuming that's flexible, STMicro offers a line of microcontrollers with USB/SPI support and a library of C-code that can be used with their parts. -- I've used their ARM7 series micros for years with great success.
Here is an excellent site maintained by Jonathan Valvano, a professor at the University of Texas. He teaches four courses over there (three undergraduate, one graduate), all are about using a 9S12 microcontroller. His site contains all the lecture notes, lab manuals, and more importantly, starter files, that he uses for all his classes.
The website looks like it's from the 90's, but just dig around a bit and you should find everything you need.
users.ece.utexas.edu/~valvano/
Consider AVR for your next MCU project because of it's wonderful LUFA and V-USB libraries.
I'm working on a project using the Atmel V71. The processor is very powerful and among lot's of high end connectivity offered on chip is a USB engine that will do device or host modes for 480 Mhz or 48Mhz (not USB 3.0). The tools are free and come with a number of host and device USB example projects with all the USB stack code right there. It supports 10 end points and all the transfers are done via DMA so you have most of the processor horsepower available for other tasks. The Atmel USB stack works without needing an RTOS
I'm planning to build a USB device that has buttons that some software needs to respond to, and indicators that the software needs to control. I'm new to USB, so I'm looking for any pointers that will get me started.
When I did some USB development a while ago, I found the information at USB Central extremely valuable.
For low bandwidth requirements, you can use something like the FT232R which is a single-chip USB serial implementation. The FTDI drivers are readily available and make the device appear as a regular serial port to the host computer. This is orders of magnitude easier than rolling your own USB implementation (for either end!).
Kinda vague, but in the past I've done a little bit of USB development. The easiest stuff tends to be HID related device as the subset of USB used to commincate is very to implement on both sides. There are hardware devices which are essentially stubbed out to work with HID, you just customize some circuity and go.
The USB standard is actually quite readable. Though it might be a bit overkill if you just want to create a simple device. You could probably get something like this, which is basically an 8051 controller with a USB connector together with firmware and a DLL.
Checkout WinDriver, which is a commercial multiplatform tool what give you easy way to implement usb drivers in user mode, source code compatible between Linux and Windows.