Is anything happening with this? I've been doing some hunting around and there are some handheld linux based devices that use a usb-eth driver that does tcp over usb...

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5124708001.html

and http://dredd.crimea.edu/ipaq/ipaq-usb-howto-new.html

I'd *love* this at work - my computer is plugged into the network, but I can't plug my empeg into the corporate network. If I could plug it into USB as I currently do *and* have access to http, ftp etc it would be fantastic!

Well, you could accomplish that today by buying a USB ethernet card and hooking that up. Someone posted one that was for sale for $5 from tigerdirect if I recall. USB sucks compared to a real NIC, but it's better than nothing...

Matthew

That's already been discussed in this very thread. It defeats part of the object of this, which is to get TCP/IP applications usable on the Mark 1 player.

Cheers,

A.

OK, so I mentioned some USB stuff in another thread, and Drakino pointed me here, and since I didn't have my soldering iron with me over Christmas I have been working on this.

Currently when I plug in my Empeg to my Win2K machine it finds a NETGEAR FA101 USB Fast Ethernet Adapter. I chose that adapter as it was available in CompUSA while I was there (so I have the real HW to see what that does), it uses the PegasusII chipset which is supported by Linux, and it is made by Netgear, so the drivers are available and it is supported.

The attachment shows the properties window, check the location field to see that it is actually the Empeg connected. At the moment it doesn't think the network cable is connected, so doesn't send any data, but I am working on that at the moment.

NOTE: This is using my MKII, I haven't tried the MK1 yet as the Mrs has it in her car at the moment.

Cool. You've made more progress than I have

I did start work on an equivalent driver but with a RTL-8150 chipset instead. It's used in the Linksys USB adapter I've got and the driver looked the simplest out of the ones available.

I never got around to finishing it however and device detection wasn't very reliable.

- Trevor

Sweet, I have that same adapter

OK, I now have the link status stuff working, and it thinks there is a connection, so can anyone tell me if this looks like an ethernet packet?

0x2a,0x00,0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
0x00,0x00,0x08,0x06,0x00,0x01,0x08,0x00,0x06,0x04,0x00,
0x01,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xc0,0xa8,0xf0,0x64,
0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xc0,0xa8,0xf0,0x69,0x80,
0x64,0x01,0x10,0x00,0x01,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
0x20,0x45,0x45,0x45,

or do I need to do some more manipulation?

Looks like an Ethernet Version II MAC frame to me. Giveaways are the 0x08 0x06 in approximately the right spot where the type field would be, and the 4-byte Frame Check Sequence at the end.

Cool, as that is what the Empeg is receiving over its USB cable

Now all I need to do is work out how to patch it in so it thinks it was received over Ethernet.
Thanks.

Nice. The only caveat I'll add is that it looks like some of the preamble is missing from the beginning of it.. Starting with 2A is okay, except that's only the last six bits of the preamble (101010.) From what I remember, the premable is supposed to be 8 bytes of solid alternating ones and zeroes.

All the frames I have captured so far start 2a then go on to something else, I am taking out a lot of my debug right now so that I can work on the next bit without pages of working stuff flying past.

Thanks for the help.

If all preambles are the same size ( 2 bytes ) and always start wit 0x2a, you shouldn't have a problem. I've ran the packet through ethereal and here's the packetdump :

Frame 1 (57 on wire, 57 captured)

    Arrival Time: Jan 12, 2003 00:41:23.8484

    Time delta from previous packet: 0.000000 seconds

    Frame Number: 1

    Packet Length: 57 bytes

    Capture Length: 57 bytes

Ethernet II

    Destination: ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff)

    Source: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (00:00:00:00:00:00)

    Type: ARP (0x0806)

    Trailer: 806401100001000000000000204545

Address Resolution Protocol (request)

    Hardware type: Ethernet (0x0001)

    Protocol type: IP (0x0800)

    Hardware size: 6

    Protocol size: 4

    Opcode: request (0x0001)

    Sender hardware address: 00:00:00:00:00:00

    Sender protocol address: 192.168.240.100

    Target hardware address: 00:00:00:00:00:00

    Target protocol address: 192.168.240.105



   0  ffff ffff ffff 0000 0000 0000 0806 0001   ................

  10  0800 0604 0001 0000 0000 0000 c0a8 f064   ...............d

  20  0000 0000 0000 c0a8 f069 8064 0110 0001   .........i.d....

  30  0000 0000 0000 2045 45                    ...... EE

If the answer was not clear, that ethereal dump shows exactly what you want, a perfectly good ethernet packet, good work!

Thanks for the additional info guys, even those protocol addresses look like the ones I was using

Progress is stalled at the moment as we have an excretion, rotary cooling device collision at work that is taking up all of my time

OK, a little more progress, I have written a fake device driver for my 'emulated' network card, and that passes data into the empegs network handlers in the same way the existing ethernet port does. When I start emplode looking for the device over Ethernet this is what I see from my debug:
RCV: LENGTH 3a
Packet of length 58
ffff ffff ffff 0009 5b03 7bf0 0806 0001
0800 0604 0001 0009 5b03 7bf0 c0a8 0064
0000 0000 0000 c0a8 0069 80d8 2810 0001
0000 0000 0001 2046 4844
netif_rx()
no backlog, and not dropping
Dequeueing SKB packet
type is 1544
pt_prev = -1072769308
Send
Packet of length 44
2a00 0009 5b03 7bf0 0009 5b03 7bdc 0806
0001 0800 0604 0002 0009 5b03 7bdc c0a8
0069 0009 5b03 7bf0 c0a8 0064

It looks like the send packet is a response back to Emplodes request, but my Empeg never turns up in the discovery window. I suspect at the moment that there is something wrong with the USB response I am sending, so I am looking at that, but can anyone confirm that this is a correct response that Emplode is looking for?

I really have no experience here, but can you not hook up the network directly and see what a good packet trace looks like? Then try to duplicate that with your driver?

That would be the ideal solution, but I am at work at the moment, and the IT department would have a fit if they found a device that wasn't theirs on the network, plus I have no free sockets near me anyway. I could use the real USB ethernet adapter I have, but I have no crossover cable so that is out.
The bottom line is that the USB TX stuff needs looking at anyway, so that is what I shall do, but I just thought I would place the packets here incase anyone recognised them

The first response will be an ARP reply; no packet will be transmitted (apart from broadcasts) to any host without the sender knowing the ethernet MAC address of the recipient first. To find this, the sender does an ARP broadcast of a "who is 1.2.3.4?". The reply is then cached for later use.

If the ARP request is being received by the empeg's kernel, it'll be sending an ARP reply; ISTR it should be the same length as the request though.

To appear in emplode requires a TCP connection and quite a bit of network traffic - identifying player type, version, etc. You'd notice this! I'd try a simple ping first, which should be an ARP request, an ARP response, an ICMP request and and ICMP response.

Hugo

It just ocurred to me that you may be sending back a "runt" packet (<64 bytes?) which is getting dropped by the host. There's a minimum ethernet frame length - pad anything <64 bytes with junk, it's ignored.

Hugo

Hi Hugo,

Thanks for the heads up on runt packets, I tried a ping and nothing, adding in the runt thing now means a second 'differant' frame is sent, but it looks like it doesn't like that response, so I am playing a little more.

Thanks,

OK, so ping now works when connected via a USB cable.

Hugo, you guys appear to send LOTS of data when I try to start Emplode, I am removing traces now as they appear to be slowing everything down.

Cool! Good work!
Looking forwards to trying it when you approeach alpha/beta stage :-)

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

Thanks,

I merged my development build with my Standard B13/HiJack301 build so I could try out the HTTP server in HiJack, but I am now having "branch through zero" problems so I just need a little more debug time before I dish it out

This is totally freaking cool stuff!!

I really want to look through the code for this once you've got it mostly working! Hopefully I'll learn some new tricks from it.

Cheers!

Mmm.. has anybody else thought through where this project is leading for Mk2(a) players.. just add the ipchains app and kernel code to the Hijack build, and your RioCar can become a router/firewall across its ethernet and USB ports.. Cool! I might use mine to filter rogue packets from an 801.11b wireless access point.. Or not.

Cheers

if we can emulate ethernet over usb, how long before we can do other devices? a general usb-host emulation layer would make anything possible... usb keyboard and a program to display the shell on the display = portable linux workstation.

usb keyboard and a program to display the shell on the display = portable linux workstation.

YES YES YES! I've been wanting that for 2 years!

The actual USB controller does some of the work still. It's still only a USB slave device. The ethernet controller that's being emulated is another USB slave device.
There isn't any way of making it appear to be a USB master which is needed to work with mice and keyboards.

- Trevor

Hehe. I think you may have misunderstood a little... Do you want the Empeg to act as a keyboard for your computer?
A better solution would be a serial-port keyboard. A shell for the empeg display already exists I seem to remember.

But What I really wish for is an empeg-USB Storage Device driver.

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

Bulk-only MSC is actually pretty easy to implement; for most users (read: windows users) it'd be rather less useful unless you have an EXT2 filesystem plugin for your windows box... actually, do those exist?!

You could always run FAT on the empeg though, with a few tweaks!

Hugo