Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
During my LED Wristwatch project, I decided early on that I wanted to do something different with the way my USB stuff was implemented. In the past, I have almost exclusively used libusb to talk to my devices in terms of raw bulk packets or raw setup requests. While this is ok, it isn't quite as easy to do once you cross out of the fruited plains of Linux-land into the barren desert of Windows. This project instead made the watch identify itself (enumerate) as a USB Human Interface Device (HID).
What I would like to do in this post is a step-by-step tutorial for modifying a USB device to enumerate as a human interface device. I'll start with an overview of HID, then move on to modifying the USB descriptors and setting up your device endpoints so that it sends reports, followed by a few notes on writing host software for Windows and Linux that communicates to devices using raw reports. With a little bit of work, you should be able to replace many things done exclusively with libusb with a cross-platform system that requires no drivers. Example code for this post can be found here:
**https://github.com/kcuzner/led-watch**
One thing to note is that since I'm using my LED Watch as an example, I'm going to be extending using my API, which I describe a little bit here. The main source code files for this can be found in common/src/usb.c and common/src/usb_hid.c.