usb


Qubes-OS 3.2: USB printer (and other devices)

Below you will find the commands we used to enable the sys-usb VM (on an installation of Qubes 3.2 where it was not enabled by default nor was the task of handling USB devices assigned to sys-net).

On dom0 terminal emulator, we executed the following first to enable sys-usb.


sudo qubesctl top.enable qvm.sys-usb;
sudo qubesctl state.highstate;

Then we modified the configuration files for the mouse (/etc/qubes-rpc/policy/qubes.InputMouse) and keyboard (/etc/qubes-rpc/policy/qubes.InputKeyboard) so that they will automatically be granted to dom0 without prompting the used each time.

We modified the content /etc/qubes-rpc/policy/qubes.InputMouse and /etc/qubes-rpc/policy/qubes.InputKeyboard to be as below:

sys-usb dom0 allow,user=root
$anyvm $anyvm deny

papouch: TMU – USB thermometer

Today, we found in stock some USB thermometers by papouch, which we decided to put to use.
We wanted to create a small bash script that would take the measurements from the thermometers and log them along with the system date/time.
After doing some minor research we got to the product website, where it had a lot of useful information about the device, device drivers and source code which can utilize the device on a Windows machine.

Unfortunately for us, there was no source code for a simple bash script on Linux.

Before we continue, lets fill our heads with some information on the device:

TMU is a simple thermometer with a USB interface. The thermometer uses the USB interface for communication and also as a power source. It measures temperatures from –55 °C to +125 °C (with 0.1 °C resolution). The communication utilizes a simple ASCII protocol. Temperature values are transmitted in degrees Celsius; no numerical conversion is necessary.

–From https://www.papouch.com/en/shop/product/tmu-usb-thermometer/

The operating system on our machine was GNU/Linux CentOS 7, after plugging in the devices, we issued the command lsusb from which we saw that the OS had recognized the devices.
From the manual we read that the interface for communication of the device with the computer is implemented via a serial port.
The configuration parameters of the serial port that the device creates were the following:

COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL
TMU cannot receive instructions, it can only send out the temperature values in regular time intervals (approx. 10 seconds).
The temperature is send in a format that is compatible with the Spinel protocol.
The thermometer’s serial line parameters are:

Speed : 9,600 Baud
Number of data bits : 8
Parity : none
Number of stop-bits : 1

— From https://www.papouch.com/en/shop/product/tmu-usb-thermometer/tmu_en.pdf/_downloadFile.php

Since the newly attached devices were USB-to-Serial devices, we knew that they would create ttyUSBx devices in the /dev folder.
Indeed, after checking into the /dev folder, there were two newly created devices ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1, one for each device.

We tried to connect to the devices using various methods and attempted to redirect the output so that we could parse it.
To our surprise, the data would ‘disappear’ from the pipe…
We could see the data on the screen when we had no pipes following and we could even replace the \r character with \n so that each new information block would appear in a new line. But, whenever we tried to do additional formatting, e.g. remove all characters that are not part of the temperature description, the whole data would vanish..

Our solution

For us process substitution did the trick!
Process substitution feeds the output of a process into the stdin of another process.
We redirected the stdout that was being generated while reading the data from the serial port to another process from where we were able to normally process them.

The following example, reads the data from the serial port, from each line it discards all characters except for characters at the positions 6 until 11 where the temperature information is presented according to the documentation.

sudo sh -c "cat < /dev/ttyUSB0" 1> >(while read line; do echo $line | cut -c6-11; done);

The above command would turn data of this format:

*B1E1+026.0
*B1E1+026.1

To this format:

+026.0
+026.1

And so we could start the development of our script.

Our script

The following script will prepend the current date and time on each line (right before the temperature reading).

 sudo sh -c "cat < /dev/ttyUSB0" 1> >(while read line; do echo $line | cut -c6-11 | xargs -L 1 echo `date`; done); 

Another solution, using miniterm.py

It has come to our attention that some times the thermometers do no work as expected using the cat command.
So, we propose an alternative using miniterm.py.
miniterm.py is a very simple serial terminal and is part of pySerial.

 miniterm.py --echo --eol CR --quiet /dev/ttyUSB0 1> >(while read line; do echo $line | cut -c6-11 | xargs -L 1 echo `date`; done); 

Some details on the format from the manual:

The protocol format is shown in this example.
Example (the data are sent without the space characters from the TMU)

*B1E1+026.1
  • 1 Byte; Prefix: the character *
  • 1 Byte; Format code: the character B
  • 1 Byte; The address of the thermometer: the character 1
  • 2 Bytes; Device instruction code: the characters E1
  • 6 Bytes; Actual temperature value. It can be number from –055.0 to +125.0 or string Err.
    An ASCII string representing the temperature value including the sign. If there is a thermal sensor’s error, the Err string is transmitted.
  • 1 Byte; Terminating character: Carriage Return (Decimal: 13, Hex: 0Dh, Binary: 00001101, Character \r)

 


ATEN – USB-to-Serial Converter (35cm) UC232A – Windows 10 (64bit) Drivers

Background

Recently we started using the UC232A USB-to-Serial Converter to connect to a board.
The software we used was TeraTerm on a 64bit Windows 10 without installing custom drivers.

Our serial port configuration was the following:

  • Baud rate: 115200
  • Data: 8 bit
  • Parity: none
  • Stop: 1 bit
  • Flow control: none
  • Transmit delay:
    5 msec/char
    5 msec/line

The problem

We noticed that something was wrong with the process as the terminal would not operate consistently.
Some times keystrokes did not appear on screen, in other times results would not appear correctly (they could be truncated or mixed with other data) and in general, the system acted like it was possessed by a ghost.

Troubleshooting

We played around with the configuration parameters, hoping that it was an issue like having the need to add large transmit delay but it did not change anything, the communication with the board was unstable.
Afterwards, we switched to another cable, of a different company, and everything worked as expected. The data on the screen was consistent and the ghost was banished. The UC232A was brand new so we tested that it works on a GNU/Linux machine, which turned out to be OK. Doing so, these two tests led us to the conclusion that since both the cable operates properly on GNU/Linux and the board operates properly using the other cable, that the issue we had was the automatically installed Windows 10 drivers.

Solution

While the cable was unplugged, we installed the official drivers we found here.
To find the drivers on that page, click on Support and Download tab at the bottom and then click on the Software & Drivers panel.
From the new table that will appear, under the category Windows Legacy Software & Driver we used the latest version that was available at the time that this post was written, which was v1.0.082 dated 2016-01-27 uc232a_windows_setup_v1.0.082.zip ([download id=”2357″] retrieved on the 23rd of November 2016).
After the download was finished, we restarted the machine, plugged in the cable and gave it another go.
The system was working as expected.

Following, you will find the screenshots from the device manager, after we got the cable working right.

uc232a-device-manager

uc232a-device-properties

uc232a-drive-file-details


VirtualBox: Failed to attach the USB device to the virtual machine 29

Recently we were using a Windows 10 64bit machine which had Oracle VirtualBox installed.
At some point all USB devices stopped mounting on the guest systems.
We would get errors similar to the following:

Failed to attach the USB device OnePlus A0001 [0232] to the virtual machine Ubuntu.

USB device 'OnePlus A0001' with UUID {544e5582-9e77-4301-a538-5326cf2250c0} is busy with a previous request. Please try again later.

Result Code: E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057)
Component: HostUSBDeviceWrap
Interface: IHostUSBDevice {c19073dd-cc7b-431b-98b2-951fda8eab89}

Callee: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}

USB device  with UUID  is busy with a previous request. Please try again later.

After a couple of restarts of both the guest and the host machines we realized that this time, a restart was not enough to fix the error.
Right before this error occurred, we had installed Wireshark with USBPcap support.
Apparently this was the root of our problem.

Resolution:

Following are the steps we followed to solve this issue:

Step A: Delete problematic system configuration.

Press the key combination Win + R to pop up the Run prompt.
Type regedit in the input box and hit the Enter key.

regedit

On the left side of the new window, navigate to the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}

upperfilters

In the right part, select the UpperFilters entry, right click it and select Delete.

delete-upperfilters
When a prompt window appear asks you to confirm that you want to delete the value, click Yes.

confirm-delete-upperfilters

Step B: Manually re-install VirtualBox USB drivers (Optional)

Just in case there is an issue with the VirtualBox USB drivers, you can re-install them to be sure everything is OK.
To do that, you can either re-install the whole VirtualBox using their installer or manually re-install the driver itself.

To re-install the VirtualBox USB driver manually, using Windows Explore navigate to this folder

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\USB\filter

Right click the file VBoxUSBMon.inf and select Install.

install-virtualbox-usb-driver
You will get a confirmation once the installation is complete.
Restart your machine, so that new changes will get applied.
Your USB devices should work as expected.