Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available

Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by pmjordan on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @04:14PM (#1891806)

As others have pointed out, in this case he probably used a hardware USB sniffer (though he apparently doesn't own an XBox, so who knows). If your device has existing drivers that will run on an OS in a VM, you can use USB passthrough (most virtualisers including VirtualBox) to run it on top of Linux, which comes with a USB logging module called "usbmon" (http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/usbmon.txt).

There are also software loggers for Windows such as "Snoopy Pro" but last time I tried that it dropped certain types of packets. No such issues with usbmon.

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by logic on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @04:56PM (#1891935)

Wireshark has had support for usbmon for a few releases now too, which gives you a considerably more useful GUI for working with USB streams.

Sadly, there aren't many (any?) protocol dissectors yet, so comms with common chips like FTDI devices don't automatically translate into something human-readable like, say, HTTP conversations.

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by daeken on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @08:58PM (#1892566)

Really? That's sort of baffling. FTDI's USB chips are damn easy to work with, I'd expect dissectors for them to be out there already. I'll have to remedy that.

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by bigiain on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @04:54PM (#1891928)

The README says he used the great big (~500mB) data dump of the USB data that Adafruit released the other day.

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