I would like to use Android phones as a way to do some processing and visualization of a sensor that would be attached to the USB port on the phone. The sensor would plug into the micro/mini USB, and then I would need to read the incoming data from the USB serial port.
Is this possible? I have heard of people using Android to steer robots and other applications, but I have never seen Android being used as a host for a USB sensor. I can't seem to find any official documentation on the subject either, but it seems like it would be a very useful tool. Any thoughts, links, or information on this matter? Thanks.
What you're looking for is USB Host support.
There's an open issue in Android's issue tracker here for it:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=738&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
and it's actually ranked 7th, in terms of "stars" (think votes, by the people), at 1110 stars. You can log in and star it yourself, both to vote for it, and to receive email updates.
There was also work on a patch back in February, 2010:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-kernel/browse_thread/thread/c8471573d7553331
and there's info on using a USB keyboard here:
http://www.tombom.co.uk/blog/?p=124
Perhaps you can find something for your sensor there?
This is cool =):
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25286/?a=fb
Cheers,
Victor
should be possible, look up android.hardware.usb.UsbDevice # http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/usb/UsbDevice.html
This support has been added since Android 3.1.
Look at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/usb/index.html
This guy has modded his Nexus One to work as a USB host and has done several cool things.
He uses a USB keyboard and runs a movie from his USB stick. Then he runs a webcam through the phone and displays it on the computer and even runs an entire desktop-based Linux distro from his phone onto his computer monitor.
Pretty amazing stuff.
http://sven.killig.de/android/N1/2.2/usb_host/
The USB defines two type of equipment 1 usb host 2usb device .A device can only be attached to a host,no host to host or device to device connection.,in the beginning usb hosts were computers to which a usb device is attached.but with increase in popularity of usb interface a number of equipments come as usb host ie you can attach your pendrive and other usb device to it.In the starting mobile phones were manufactured as usb device ie you can attach your phone to usb host only typically a computer.but there also revolution come in now we have phone which can act as host and device when it is working as host we can attatch printer to it and when it work as device it can be attatched to a computer.only high end phone has this support.low end phones are still usb devices.
so we have two options
phone in usb host mode and your senser as usb device(you will need microcontroller that can act as usb device for this purpose-eg pic 18f2550 microcontroller);
your phone as device and your senser circuit as usb host here you will need high end microcontrollers that can act as usb host
in both cases there involves coding at both phone and senser circuit microcontroller
i dont know anything about phone side coding but i think this helps you to get a direction to what to do.
Have a look at You Are Here GPS.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.agbooth.usbgps
Related
Ok, so I have researched this somewhat and am not encouraged, but I'm going to ask anyway, and be specific about what I'm trying to do. Maybe it will help!
I have a custom board with DaVinci processor with USB 2.0 OTG controller on it. I have it configured as a host with an attached hub and various peripherals. This processor runs Monta Vista Linux (MVL) 4.0 with 2.6.18 based kernel. This custom board some video processing and streaming.
I also have a Moto Droid. I can attach the phone as a USB device to my DaVinci system and MVL will enumerate the phone, but obviously doesn't know which driver to use. That I can fix.
So what I would ideally like to do is be able to have a data connection between my board and the phone, and use the phone with a custom app, as a configuration tool (initially). I'm thinking RNDIS would be wonderful, but I don't know if Android supports that on the USB port. Then my custom app would establish a connection over the USB to a server on my custom board.
Can anyone attest to what Android DOES support over USB, besides adb and flash file system?
Any other suggestions are welcome, although please don't tell me "Bluetooth", it doesn't have bandwidth for video, which is a future goal.
Thanks!
For small amounts of data, you could look at Working Android with Arduino, which points at Microbridge (http://code.google.com/p/microbridge/) or you could also look at IOIO (http://ytai-mer.blogspot.com/2011/04/meet-ioio-io-for-android.html).
For things like video, adb port forward (http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html#forwardports) could be you friend (assuming you have the networking stack on MVL all setup and adb configured). You can basically set up port tunnels for TCP over USB and shift reasonably large amounts of data over the link. One end of the connection (probably the android device) runs a TCP/HTTP server, and the custom board opens connections to communicate. This works reasonably well, you set up a thread running adb devices to detect the plugging in of the Droid device, run adb port forward to set up the port forward, then open your sockets and you're good to go.
Is using 802.11 an option for you on the Davinci board? E.g. either via a Wifi USB dongle or through wired ethernet to an AP? If so, that would seem to be an easier route to communicate with Android than trying to go through USB. Or are your video resolution and compression requirements more than what you'd expect to realistically get through 802.11?
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.