Convert To USB

Creating a USB Driver with a Toolkit

There are two software packages that allow you to quickly create a USB driver by automating lot of the work for you as much as possible. They are from Jungo and Compuware NuMega. One thing to note is the USB toolkit software seems to take two different routes in generating a functioning USB driver. One way is to create a very generic driver that just handles the very basic USB communication and thus builds a specialized device only or a device specific driver that runs in the user mode of your operating system along with its corresponding INF file for install. The other type of tool kit provides you as the programmer libraries to call in helping you write a custom driver for your device.

Not a lot of programming is needed for the generic type of driver and it is quite fast to put together. But the downside is that it can’t handle every situation you might use it for. The other type of USB driver that uses programming libraries is more flexible and takes more time because you have to do the C programming.

Jungo’s WinDriver toolkit is the user mode type and really requires no programming at all. You simply fill in the details in its Driver Wizard and you get files that you can compile and build a custom user mode driver in one executable file. The user mode driver works by communicating with Jungo’s provided kernel mode driver, which does the low level driver work. An install INF file is also created. Your application can use the built driver by using device specific functions. You can also test device before you create the USB driver with the WinDriver Device Wizard. Jungo also has a way in which you can get faster performance by moving some of your generated programming code into its kernel mode driver by use of their kernel plug ins. There is a Linux version of WinDriver.

There are two products for creating custom drivers. They are CompuWare’s DriverWorks and Jungo’s Kernel Driver USB. You fill in the details in both toolkit’s programming Wizards and they create template code that will compile into a driver. You have to have some knowledge of the toolkit’s code libraries to do what you want, but the final result is much more efficient and as fast as if the USB driver were written from scratch with the Windows Driver Device Development Kit (DDK).

Resource links:

Programming the Microsoft Driver Model (book)
Jungo
NuMega Wikipedia page

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