Device : Google Nexus 5 (Un-rooted)
Host Machine : Window 7
I want to Access Android Device as a Modem (using COM or Modem Port) and eventually pass AT Commands using HyperTerminal/Teraterm.
So after connecting the device to a Windows Box, The Device gets detected under Device Manager, but doesn't show any COM Port (other than the default COM0).
On right click and update driver, It shows it cannot find drivers.
I have tried the following options, but no luck with any.
Tried this on a rooted Nexus 5, but doesn't expose which /dev/smdX to use. Tried all combinations, didn't work.
Tried the Google USB Drivers from the Google Android's Website. No changes.
From here. I Installed drivers from LG Electronics, No changes in COM Port.
Universal Naked Driver helped me get to ADB Shell interface, but
thats not what I want.
In all of the Above procedure USB Debugging was enabled (Just saying).
I also heard the phone has to put into Modem mode to fire AT Commands.
If so, How do I do that ?
Or Is this a device driver Issue ?
Conclusion:
I want to access the Modem of the Android Device and fire AT Commands to it.
Could you please tell what am I missing ?
Any help on this would be really appreciated.
It's difficult to give an exact answer to this question, because it depends on how the manufacturer has implemented the device drivers. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information that isn't in the public domain.
It is possible, that the manufacturer has implemented some code to convert the device to a modem. Doing this yourself is device-specific, and proprietary. You might be able to get hold of a converter, for example bundled with the manufacturer's dashboard application for the PC, if such a thing exists.
Some devices don't expose the modem port at all. They may be visible as a network adapter, or as an always-connected LAN connection. If the device is visible as a network adapter, then you can access it via Windows Mobile Broadband API, or via MBIM for some newer devices.
To check if the device is visible as a network adapter, and get information about it, open a cmd box and type
netsh mbn show interfaces
Windows Mobile Broadband API doesn't give as many details as a good AT command set, but performs basically the same functions. MBIM is an industry standard interface with similar functionality, available on the Windows 8+ desktop via the Mobile Broadband DeviceServices API, for devices that support it.
If the device shows as an always-on LAN connection, there is probably a proprietary, high level interface for mobile functionality.
Driver behaviour can differ for different operating systems. If you have the chance to try the device on Windows Vista, 7 and 8, you may see different behaviour.
Related
I am trying to develop an wifi peer to peer application in android(4.+).
The problem here is how to test it.
I tried to run that application in android emulator. there was no option to configure wifi in the settings menu, i also tired to enable wifi using the dev tools application form the emulator but it didn't work, And through all my googling over 3 days and i found that Android emulator is not supported the Wifi.
So i opted for androidx86 4.0eeepc using virtual box and tired to add devices both wifi and bluetooth (my app uses both bluetooth and wifi) but only bluetooth device got added and it did not work. But my virtual box detected the wifi and bluetooth devices. I just couldnt get them work with the virtual machine.
I tried everything like manually adding the addresses using terminal emulator app in androidx86 and used netcfg through the android commandline but neither of them worked.
Please suggest and guide me on the correct path to run these kind of applications that use wifi and bluetooth in android.
Thanks in advance.
First, be sure you enabled WiFi Direct in the Android settings for the two virtualbox instances:
Settings --> Wireless & Networks --> More... --> Wi-Fi direct
It has been stated as working once that hurdle was overcome, and I'm sure many have experienced the same...just be sure to enable wifi direct
I would have tried exactly what you've already tried by naturally moving from the emulator to the androidx86 project. Although unreliable, I'd recommend looking at and finagling this, if you haven't yet seen it: Android: Simulate WiFi in the emulator? and How to disable/enable network, switch to Wifi in Android emulator? most likely wouldn't have full out success but may be enough to let you know that it works or would work.
As far as testing WiFi-Direct/WiFiP2P without you yourself having a device/s, I would recommend:
Trying out some of the fiddling as mentioned above. And read through tons of logs.
You could always crowd source it to friends, or release an apk on a forum for a small group of testers.
Of course, both of those options are not ideal, seamless, or fast. So, I'd definitely hope you get VirtualBox VMs of AndroidX86 4.0 running as it should once you check that setting and pair up the WiFi APs :-)
A near future solution:
This might be something to look into in near future.
Real devices are hosted by Samsung and screens are streamed to your PC.
http://developer.samsung.com/remoteTestLab.do
According to an email responded by samsung, which I sent to them earlier.
They only have 2 devices (Galaxy Nexus) running on Android v4.0 at the moment.
Unfortunately they are not physically close to each other. (One in Korea, One in Poland)
But they are planning to upgrade existing Galaxy S2 to v4.0.
Because recently Samsung have released v4.0 upgrade for S2.
Once they done that, there will be plenty of v4.0 phones.
And you can ask them which 2 phones are physically close so you can test Wifi Direct.
--------------------------- EDIT ---------------------------------
There are plenty of ICS devices there now, which you can test P2P.
Check with them which 2 are physically near to each other.
Per the docs:
Each instance of the emulator runs behind a virtual router/firewall
service that isolates it from your development machine's network
interfaces and settings and from the internet.
You have to use Network Redirection, as described in the Developer Docs. In essence, you forward specific ports using ADB. Therefore you cannot test certain things like broadcast messages.
I have tried doing what you are trying to do, and-- while I won't say it is impossible (anything is possible in computing with enough time, money, and persistence)-- I wasted a lot of time on it. You cannot treat the Android emulator as a normal network peer-to-peer device. As far as I have been able to find, it is a fork of QEMU, and that is just how the QEMU emulator is implemented.
QEMU itself does support TUN/TAP bridging, but I was never able to get it working with the Android emulator. If you want to go that route, you may want to investigate running Android in the QEMU emulator, rather than in the SDK's emulator (I see you are already trying a similar approach with VirtualBox).
Unfortunately the best way to test a peer-to-peer networking program in Android is with physical devices at this time-- unless your app can suffice with the port forwarding method.
See Also: Issue 26:Emulated Androids should be able to communicate via TCP, and Google
(Repeating here my answer elsewhere.)
In theory, linux (the kernel underlying android) has mac80211_hwsim driver, which simulates WiFi. It can be used to set up several WiFi devices (an acces point, and another WiFi device, and so on), which would make up a WiFi network.
It's useful for testing WiFi programs under linux. Possibly, even under user-mode linux or other isolated virtual "boxes" with linux.
In theory, this driver could be used for tests in the android systems where you don't have a real WiFi device (or don't want to use it), and also in some kind of android emulators. Perhaps, one can manage to use this driver in android-x86, or--for testing--in android-x86 run in VirtualBox.
I want to make a remote control for my tv using my android phone. I plan to connect my external infrared device to the phone via usb. An application on the phone should do the processing and send out commands to the infrared device via usb. Is it possible to explicitly access the phone's usb interface from the application to send/receive data? The data will just be short binary strings. In one instance, the phone should be the host and in the other instance, the phone should be a client.
For this to be possible, I believe you will need a USB host driver for your phone. While these drivers are available for some devices (see link), you'll need to have root access to install them, and it won't be easy. For instance, here's a description of how to install a USB host driver for the Nexus One.
Given how few devices support USB host, there seems to be very little documentation one how one would actually go about accessing a specific USB device. The second link above, to the Nexus One driver, provides some sparse details. Beyond that I can only assume that you'd need to write your own driver for the specific device, which would probably be similar to standard Linux USB driver development. This XDA thread (started by the author of the N1 USB host driver) is probably the best source of information you'll find.
Unfortunately the short answer is that what you want to do will be very difficult, and you certainly won't be able to distribute your work easily if you do manage it. Good luck!
Is it possible to access the USB port on Android phones? (Droid X for example)
Here is my usage case:
Have a USB device attached to the Android phone. The phone listens for data on this USB device. (The USB device is connected to a USB->RS-232 converter that has I/O attached to it)
This would be slick if possible. Does anyone know if this is possible?
Would be slick, yup. Not possible though. There's a feature request for it: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=738
Actually it is possible on a lot of the phones if you are able to install a new kernel with a USB host driver and rig up a custom cabling scheme to provide usb bus power to the device as the phone won't. A few phones even shipped with this capability already live.
I don't know if the Droid X specifically ships with this already, can have it added (if you are able to flash kernels), could have it added but no one has written the host driver yet, or is missing the hardware capability.
You also would need to enable the appropriate usb serial converter device driver (identified by experimenting with the device on a desktop linux box), but that's probably already in the kernel sources and just needs to be selected in the config. You may also need to create a device file for the /dev/ttyUSB0 or whatever and give it permissions appropriate to the application that wants to access it. (This requires root, but if you can reflash the kernel, you can get root)
If you want to pursue this, search the android kernel google group for posts about USB host mode.
One serious downside to putting the USB into host mode is that you loose the adb interface into the phone, which makes working on your projects hard. You'll probably need to either build an adapter for the low voltage debug serial port if there is one (as on G1, mytouch, etc) so you can get a console shell (or just use that instead of USB to talk to your peripheral) or at a minimum set up an ssh and sftp server on the wifi.
Since you want serial anyway, another option people have used is to get a bluetooth-to-serial module from an outfit such as sparkfun.
A bluetooth to serial adapter might solv your problems.
You can find one at https://www.sparkfun.com/products/582. Boards from other companies are also available for example on ebay.
I've been able to find a few posts on StackOverflow about how to control USB devices using an Android phone -- which I understand is impossible (The Android being a USB device and all.)
However, I would be perfectly happy to set up my application to communicate with the other computer (a Linux host) as a USB device. (Like a really expensive mouse...)
Does anybody have information about how to set up an Android app/phone to use the USB connection and exchange data with a host computer. Obviously, it already works at some level -- it's how Eclipse and Android SDK/debugger do what they do, but I'm still looking for some way to do this in an application.
(My current phone, BTW, is a Droid Incredible.)
Thanks,
R.
Basically you'd need to install the USB device driver and the ADB toolsuite from the SDK, either that or reverse engineer their functionality and build it into something else.
Then you enable USB debugging on the phone.
And then you can do something like an adb port forward to allow an application on the pc to connect to a network socket listener on the phone. Note that connections cannot be made in the other direction, but once a connection is made it is bidirectional.
If your version of android supports tethering over USB, you could also leverage that to implicitly create a network between the PC and the phone, at which point you can make connections in either direction. Just make sure nothing starts accidentally pumping lots of data through the phone's mobile network!
(Many android phones actually can experimentally function as USB hosts, but you have to compile new drivers into the kernel, install the new version, and make up a cable to provide USB power to the device as the phone cannot. Also you lose the ADB over USB channel which makes debugging a pain)
What would be the best way to access the USB as a serial port on an Android device (HTC Magic)?
I am thinking about an OBD-II interface. Can I do this on a standard phone or more likely will I need a modified firmware?
According to this post, Matt Porter presented a review of Android at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. I mention this mostly because of the example used to describe the current state of Android.
"Just one more practical example: You cannot even plug a USB drive to an android system, since /dev/sd* is not an expected device name in their hardcoded hotplug management.
Executive summary: Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination."
I'm sure someone's working on it, but I'm afraid for now you're out of luck unless you're willing to go low-level and edit the OS.
PSFreedom (project to jailbrack Playstation 3) has list of controllers which support usb host mode which then translate to supported Android devices.
My own expirience is that usb host works on HTC Dream/G1 without problems.
For OBD-II I would suggest bluetooth ODB-II dongle which side-stepps problem with usb host adapter.
Depending on the USB chip in your particular phone, it may be possible to rebuild the kernel to support USB Host mode or USB On-The-Go (Host + Gadget modes) instead of the normal USB Gadget mode. I've found some people speculating that it could be possible on the HTC Dream. Assuming you could reconfigure the USB port in Host mode a USB to serial, ODB-II, or CAN should be doable.
From what I can tell Android is Linux of some sort, to have USB device which would apear as serial port, you should write a driver for that device. I don't know much about OBD-II interface but i am guesing they use some sort of USB driver for windows, same is for android, not mentioning the application to handle the driver.
I don't think the current Android devices can act as a USB host only as a USB device when attached to a host. So using the USB port as a serial port is not likely.
Get a hostmode kernel for your device and you can use python for android and the pyserial library to talk to the serial over USB. I did this with Huawei Ideos U8150 (here is the post) for a loopback test.