I'm struggling to find a Java API that enables to grab the input of any device connected through USB. I've found jUsb but it seems deprecated and old.
What I would like is:
We had the same problem for our USB sensors: There no 100% Java solution. You will always need an OS specific code that is written in another language (and that has access to the native API).
The most portable solution that we have found is to implement a kind of gateway that will encapsulate USB data over a localhost TCP socket. We have 3 implementations of the gateway (OSX, UNIX and Windows) that will call native API to interact with USB device. The Java code will send/receive USB traffic troughs the TCP gateway. We have done some benchmarks and we have measure that the overall difference between a pure C++ code and the Java implementation is less than 10ms (for a large 45ms transaction), while the latency is negligible (no impact) once you have an open channel.
We have written an post that explain our solution here.
You need to install device drivers that can detect your device first.
In the Device Manager -> Ports(COM & LPT) you can see the port to which your device is connected to. eg COM1/COM2/COM3
You can code to add listener events for reading data from these ports. There are many libraries available to work with COM Ports. This link can be useful to you.
I use comm.jar to read inputs from the hand held scanner device.
In the past I have used libusb. Not simple but if you root around enough you can get drivers for several operating systems and Java bindings.
