usb communication

[tonga]

Hi to all,
I must to send and receive data, via usb port, using Android phone. How can I do?
Thanks

 

[Erel]

What is the other device?

 

[tonga]

The other device is a microcontroller

 

[Erel]

You can use the USB library to connect to USB clients. However not all Android devices support USB host mode.

 

[tonga]

With the phrase "not all Android devices support USB host mode" is related to version of Android? For example the devices (phones and tablet) with the version at least 4.0 supports the USB host mode?

 

[mleffler]

I've done a lot of work recently with USB on Android. It is not as easy as you would like. Android 3 and up allow for USB host but it does not mean the USB port works the way you may think. The USB connection was mainly added for connecting mice and keyboards. Connecting things other than that can get tricky.

I had been attempting to get a microcomputer based piece of hardware working using an FTDI chip with Android. I found you can not do it without a special library, the standard USB functions will not work. So far there are not any B4A libraries that I saw for this. There are a couple of Android/Java libraries out there however and I started to convert one to B4A but got pulled away and I dont know when I would get back to it.

This is the last one I saw for FTDI. ksksue-FTDriver-v1.0-33-ga7f0811. You should be able to find it if you do a search on this forum. It comes with a sample program that works with FTDI hardware.

There is another one in the forum for a different brand of controller that might be of use also.

If you take the time to create a USB library for FTDI or convert one please share it on this forum. It seems to be getting more popular and I know I will have to get back to it at some point.

 

[Erel]

We tested the FTDI library sometime ago and it wasn't working properly. At least on the devices we tested it (Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola XOOM).