my problem is to connect two identical devices with OTG-capable USB interfaces. Is this a simple giveaway or do I have to start and stop host- and device-mode manually with an arbitrary timing pattern so that eventually one is hit in device mode when the other one is an OTG host? From skimming over the APIs of several USB-stack producers it is unclear to me if symmetrical connections are possible at all.
regards,
slarti
PS: the device is an AVR32
The official cable has a "jumper" in the A end that tells the device it is plugged into to be the host. The OTG Supplement also includes a Host Negotiation Protocol which allows the two dual-role devices to interchange roles.
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I have a GSM LTE evaluation board which contains a USB slave device port and a evaluation board for microcontroller which also contains USB slave device.
I want to send commands to GSM module using the controller boards through USB.
After browsing couple of hours on internet i didn't find anything helpful.
My question is that is there any possible way to communicate two USB slave device??
Any help is appreciated...
Thank you in advance
Two USB devices cannot communicate directly one to another. Unless they support OTG. In most cases it is needed USB host controller between those two USB devices to provide some kind of link between them.
Hopefully I will have more luck today. I have no prior USB integration and about 8 months of learning embedded systems on Atmel devices. I am trying to use an Atmel SAM L series to connect over USB to a computer. The use case is for data transfer. Specifically, the MCU will be gathering data from it's sensors and packaging it for USB transfer.
I have searched through and read up on all of Atmel's included USB examples. I have also started reading through usb.org's class specifications for CDC.
I have running now something that lets me send data along one com port, into the target usb and then out the debugger usb to another com port. However, I don't think this is real USB.
My problem is two fold.
1.) I do not fully understand what differentiates USB from serial communication on a com port.
2.) Even if I were doing it correctly, I'm not sure how to test and verify that I have indeed created a legitimate USB device that can be accepted by a host computer.
Links to documentation(Atmel or generic) or example code would be appreciated.
1) USB is defined in the USB specifications from http://www.usb.org. Serial ports were an older and simpler interface that involved sending data back and forth asynchonously on pins with names like TX and RX. The USB CDC class and its ACM subclass allow you to make a USB device that emulates a serial port. If you make your device be a USB CDC ACM device, then you don't need to supply any drivers for Windows 10, Linux, or Mac OS X.
2) You can read the USB specification and the CDC ACM specification. You can run the USB command verifier. You can test your device with a variety of different USB hosts to make sure it works.
I'm trying to implement UART over a USB interface on the STM324x9I-EVAL development board. The purpose is to send commands to a servo controller (or other hardware, for that matter) serially. I've successfully implemented the USB_Device_CDC example on the development board but am unsure exactly how this works without a PC with drivers on the other end. As far as other hardware is concerned, will the USB port now simply look like a serial port? Or is there still a need for a driver or some sort of interface on the other end?
I do want to point out that I'm aware of the following post:
Emulating UART over USB
but I don't believe my question is fully answered within the context of that answer.
A USB connection is not a peer-to-peer connection like a UART. It requires a host and a device in a master/slave relationship. The device cannot initiate data transfer; it must be continuously polled by the by the host.
A CDC/ACM class device presents a virtual COM port on a PC host, but that does not allow the device to communicate with a UART interface. It looks like a serial port at the software level, but does not implement a UART physical layer. There is an awful lot going on under the hood to make it look like a PC serial port, but none of it resembles UART communications at the physical level.
There are devices that act as UART/USB bridges (from FTDI and Prolific for example), and you could (somewhat expensively) build your own from a microcontroller that has a USB device controller and a UART, but the bridge is a USB device and must still connect to a USB host; these are normally used to connect a PC to a microcontroller that lacks a USB controller or where the software/CPU overhead of using a USB controller is too great.
In theory you could connect a microcontroller that has a USB host controller to one that has a USB device controller, but you need host and device software stacks on each respectively, and once you have the USB connection, implementing CDC/ACM is a somewhat inefficient use of the available bandwidth. The purpose of the CDC/ACM class is primarily to allow "legacy" software to work on a PC.
If you need to connect to a "real" serial port, you should use a real UART - which are far more ubiquitous than USB controllers on microcontrollers in any case.
You should learn a little bit about USB device classes. CDC is a USB device class, and ACM is a subclass that I assume you are using. The device you made could be called a "CDC ACM device" because it uses the CDC class and the ACM subclass.
These classes and subclasses are defined by the USB Implementers Forum in documents that you can find here:
http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/
These documents specify things like what USB descriptors a CDC ACM device should have in order to describe itself to the host, and what kinds of interfaces and endpoints it should have, and how serial data will be represented in terms of USB transactions and transfers.
Note that CDC ACM only specifies some USB commands for transferring data between the host and the device. It does not specify what the device will actually do with that data. You can use CDC ACM to implement a USB-to-serial adapter, or you can just use it as a general purpose communication interface for whatever data you want to send.
Yes, you do need a driver on the PC side. The driver needs to be designed to run on your specific operating system. It needs to create some kind of virtual serial port device in your operating system that other software (which only knows about serial ports) can find and connect to. It needs to translate serial port operations performed by other software on the serial port (e.g. writing some bytes to the serial port) into low-level USB commands according to the CDC ACM specifications (e.g. sending some bytes out to the device on a particular endpoint in the form of USB packets). It needs to somehow know which USB devices it should operate on, since not every USB device is a CDC ACM device.
For Windows, you will probably use the usbser.sys driver which comes with Windows. For versions of Windows older than Windows 10, you will need to write an INF file to associate your device to usbser.sys and sign it. For Windows 10 and later, there is a new INF file called usbser.inf already included with Windows which will automatically match any valid CDC ACM device. This means you don't have to write or distribute a driver for CDC ACM devices if you only intend to support using the device on Windows 10 or later. The partnership between Microsoft and Arduino which began in 2015 gives me hope that Microsoft will continue supporting and improving usbser.sys in the future. In fact, they claim that in Windows 10 "the driver has been rewritten by using the Kernel-Mode Driver Framework that improves the overall stability of the driver", so that is good news.
For Linux, there is the cdc_acm kernel module, which has been a standard part of the kernel for a long time and should work automatically with any CDC ACM device you plug in.
For Mac OS X, there is the AppleUSBCDCACM driver, which should work automatically with any CDC ACM device you plug in.
Note that for any of these drivers to recognize your device and work with it, your device has to have certain values in its USB descriptors, and the requirements can vary depending on what exact driver version you are talking about.
Will the USB port now simply look like a serial port?
No, that's the wrong way to think about it. The USB port will still look like a USB port, but the various USB drivers provided by your operating system will recognize that a CDC ACM device is plugged into that port and create a new entry in your operating system's list of serial ports. Then if you run some software that only knows about serial ports, it can connect to that port.
In fact, if you make a composite device, you can have a single USB device plugged into a single USB port that actually has two or more virtual serial ports.
I want to communication between two different android phone via USB. I look at Google SDK guide I don't know how can i do.Somebody can give me some suggests ? Thank you very much !
The USB-Standard requires to work as host-client-mechanism. This means in particular, that you usually have a host-controller (for example inside your PC) which a client (USB-drive, MP3-player, mobile phone) can connect to.
The host is responsible for negotiating and establishing a connection. If you want to connect two clients with each other, one of them must Support USB-On-The-Go to serve as a host with limited capabilities.
From Wikipedia
The design architecture of USB is asymmetrical in its topology, consisting of a host, a multitude of downstream USB ports, and multiple peripheral devices connected in a tiered-star topology. Additional USB hubs may be included in the tiers, allowing branching into a tree structure with up to five tier levels. A USB host may implement multiple host controllers and each host controller may provide one or more USB ports. Up to 127 devices, including hub devices if present, may be connected to a single host controller.[20][21] USB devices are linked in series through hubs. One hub—built into the host controller—is the root hub.
A device has USB OTG support. Following are scenarios:
When a device is connected to a PC, the device acts as slave. (How does the device know it has to act as slave?)
When a device is connected to a printer, the device acts as master.
(How does the device know it has to act as master?)
What are the steps executed when a device is connected to OTG?
How to implement this mechanism (in brief)?
The exact behavior of USB OTG devices is described in the specification you can find at usb.org. There is a PDF inside the zip called USB_OTG.
The Host Negotiation Protocol in section 6 covers how two OTG devices decide which one is getting the embedded host. Basically this is archived by driving pull-up and pull-down resistors on the D+ line.
Note: When talking about USB the terms master/slave are not used. The master is called host and powers the bus whereas the slave is called device. In the case of OTG (in general, see specification for exceptions) both parts have the capability to be host or device. When the host was figured out by the Host Negotiation Protocol, this part becomes the so called embedded host.
In the two scenarios you mentioned the USB device is able to know whether to be a host or device by the cable. USB cables (non type-C) are not symmetrical. One side is host and the other is device. There is a pin on the connector called the ID pin which is floated on the device side and grounded on the host side. This allows the USB controller on each side to know which side of the cable it is connected to and thus which role (host or device) it should be when connected. These types of devices are called dual-role devices.
If you have a such a device, then you can plug it into a regular host (like your laptop) and it will act as a device. And you can plug it into a regular device (like a printer) and it will act as a host. This is all based on the cable.
If you plug two dual-role OTG devices to each other. Their initial roles are determined by the cable in the same way.
After the initial roles are determined, they can then swap roles from their initial cable-determined roles via the Host-Negotiation Protocol (HNP).
As far as implementing this. There is no brief way to explain it. Every controller is different and you would have to read the controller databook and programming model to implement all these procedures. As well as having a good understanding of the USB and OTG specs themselves.
A good place to start is http://usb.org where you can find all the specs.