[CentOS] Reverse engineering USB devices

Fri Apr 30 15:59:57 UTC 2010
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:49:34 +0300 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> 2010/4/30 Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>:
> > I'm pretty sure this is the wrong list, but maybe some clever people
> > here can redirect me...
> >
> > I have a "RCA RS2100 Bookshelf Audio System"
> >  http://www.woot.com/blog/viewentry.aspx?id=2744
> > This is radio/CD/mp3 player... PLUS it can stream audio wirelessly.
> > You plug a USB device into your PC and you can remote control what gets
> > played from the RS2100 remote control ("Wireless Musiclink").
> >
> > BUT only with Windows Media Center.
> >
> > When I plugged the device in it appears to look like 3 devices; a HID,
> > an audio device and something else I can't remember (I'm not at that
> > machine at the moment).  My feeling is that the HID is used to inject
> > commands from the RS2100 (eg "play track <x>"), the audio device is for
> > streaming and the third device is feedback for the remote display.
> >
> > The question I have... how can I reverse engineer the protocol used so
> > that I can make this work on my CentOS machine?  (I don't want to run
> > a Windows instance just for remote audio!).  Any hints, tips, pointers etc
> > much appreciated.
> 
> try usbsnoop or similar tools.

You can also connect up with the libusb mailing list on sourceforge. 
Someone there might have already written a user-mode driver for it.

> 
> --
> Eero,
> RHCE
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>                                                                                                        

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