I want to build a USB device trace appliance

Projects General Guidance
1

Greetings,

I am just getting into Arduino, not having even purchased an bits ,yet. I have years and years o?f software development experience and am very comfortable working close to "the metal". Reading "Making Things Talk" by Tom Igoe got me thinking...

The project I am thinking about i?s an Arduino appliance that would sit between a computer and a usb device and record or cause to be recorded every protocol interaction. My nefarious plot is to use this information to develop drivers on my Linux system for unsupported devices.

Feasible? Done???

Thanks.

2

Feasible?

Not really. Even a USB 1.0 device is allowed to communicate with up to 12 Mbit/s, USB 2.0 allows 480Mbit/s. This is too much for a device that has a core clock of 16MHz and 2kB of RAM, let alone that without additional hardware the Arduino's not able to be the host (master) side of the USB communication.

Your project is much easier if implemented on the PC side as a software solution. The hardware will be tough and needs much faster computing speeds and more memory.