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USB host shield on Espruino: Part 8

I still haven't successfully received data from the meter, but analysing the USB packets using the logic analyser that I started with yesterday has been super helpful.

After I discovered yesterday that there wasn't any USB bulk transfer data being sent on the bus, I had a look at the relevant code and it turns out that I didn't define two of the registers correctly. Once that was fixed I could successfully load data into the SNDFIFO register, put the number of bytes to be sent in the SNDBC register, and send it on its way. I verified using the logic analyser that my bulk transfer data was now appearing on the USB bus.

Unfortunately, nothing is coming back yet. I figured that maybe I should try to sniff the packets between my WebUSB app and the cable, so I opened up my USB hub:

usbHub

After my initial surprise to discover that the PCB is purple[1], I connected the logic analyser the same way I did yesterday – straight to the USB connector.

And guess what? It worked great. I can see USB traffic between an app on my computer and a device connected to my USB hub, down to the bit-level. This means I can even sniff USB traffic on macOS El Capitan and Sierra, where Wireshark doesn't work. Now to figure out what is different between the WebUSB-to-device and Espruino-to-device communication.


  1. I've only ever seen purple PCBs from the awesome OSH Park ↩︎

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