[mdlug] Capturing USB events for reverse-engineering?

[David Hensley]

David,
  Did you make any progress? The lsusb/wireshark suggestions will help you
figure out the data streams the button push, et. al., trigger, but you are
going to have to find out about the software in windows and what
libraries/functions it is using if you want to reproduce it's behavoir.
This can be done with a debugger or disassembler but it's much easier if
you can get the "symbols" from the producer, and that seems unlikely in
your case. You can disassemble it to assembly, which if you understand,
would allow you to re-create the operation in *nix with whatever language
you like, but it would be quite a bit of work without the debugging symbols
and a debugging compiled version of the windows software (usually these are
"stripped" out for a production release for size and performance reasons;
try 'man strip' in linux for more info).
  FTR in *nix you can use commands like ldd, objdump, yasm/nasm,
ltrace/strace, dtrace, strings, readelf, gdb, ar, ranlib, nm, and many
others to get all sorts of info on a compiled executable.  There are
similar commands in windows, but I don't know their names off the top of my
head anymore.


On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Mark Thuemmel <ldaphelp at thuemmel.com>wrote:

> On 09/13/2013 03:28 PM, David McMillan wrote:
>
>>
>> So, I've got this cheap USB microscope that both Windows and Linux
>> recognize as a standard webcam. But it has a button on it to trigger
>> taking images, which only works with the Windows-only proprietary
>> software that came with the 'scope. And it occurred to me that detecting
>> this button push under Linux and using it to trigger a capture probably
>> shouldn't be too hard (this unit is too cheap for the mfgr to have spent
>> much effort on anti-hacking measures). But then I realized -- I have no
>> idea how one goes about this kind of thing. It's just never come up in
>> my "Linux life" before.
>> So... anyone know a good "idiot's guide" place to start?
>>
>
> do a lsusb from a terminal prompt and look for the ID of your device. If
> you don't know which one it is, try it unplugged and then plugged in and
> see what appears.  Looks like this:
>
> Bus 007 Device 002: ID 045e:0040 Microsoft Corp. Wheel Mouse Optical
>
> Then Google the numbers with the colon (045e:0040 in this case) that and
> see if you can identify it.
>
>
>
> I wonder if http://www.lirc.org/ could read it and act on button....
>
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