Connect USB device to Android Emulator?

Question

We've been looking into Android 3.1+ and its ability to read/write to USB devices connected to the OTG/Host port.

I've found some code examples that allow me to detect and read/write to a USB HID device, but at the moment, I simply don't have a physical 3.1+ compatible device to deploy and remotely debug on.

Does anyone know how I can attach my HID device to the emulator, via the PC/Eclipse so the app can detect and read/write to/from the device?

I've tried listing the currently connected USB Devices but it shows none, as you'd no doubt guess.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Answer 1

The Android emulator is based on QEMU. Even if the emulator version is so ancient, there appears to be support for passing USB devices from the host. It does not seem to be available for ARM devices though, the emulated ARM machine does not have a USB controller. (I have already tried enabling all USB host controllers for the goldfish_armv7 kernel based on Linux 3.4, without luck. The default emulator goldfish_armv7 kernel does not even have Host USB enabled.)

If you are not limited to ARM and can use x86, then I suggest to check out http://www.android-x86.org/, its images can be used with a standard QEMU i386 (or x86_64) machine. This also yields better performance by using the KVM extension on Linux.

To passthrough a USB device with of vendor ID 1234 and device ID abcd, you can run the emulator command:

emulator -avd x86-machine -qemu -usb -usbdevice host:1234:abcd

Or, when using QEMU:

qemu-system-i386 -m 1G -cdrom android-x86.iso -usb -usbdevice host:1234:abcd

You will need read/write permissions for /dev/bus/usb/XXX/YYY, for that you can create a udev rule such as:

SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="end_skip_usb"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1234", ATTRS{idProduct}=="abcd", TAG+="uaccess"
LABEL="end_skip_usb"

Now, upon insertion of the USB device, your emulator should recognize a USB device. This is tested for a Linux installation with a Android x86 4.3 image.

Answer 2

AFAIK this isn't possible. Android emulators do not emulate many things that exist in real devices... but this reminds me of an attempt to run ADB over Bluetooth.

This isn't a direct positive answer to your question but perhaps it can help you find a workaround the way I did: Install an "emulator" on a physical x86 netbook (dual-boot) and use the links referred to in my posts to accomplish what you are trying to do via WiFi or Bluetooth.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Create android Virtual Machine on virtualBox or vm player with this image.

Connect USB and connect with Eclipse using ADB connect (your device IP).

Answer 4

Installed android guest in virtualbox with Windows 7 host using image android-x86-4.0-r1-eeepc.iso from here (because my company's computer locked bios and I couldn't enable the vt-x emulation I had to install a version prior to 4.4). Then pluged in a usb drive, opened VM - Settings - USB in Virtualbox Manager, clicked the second icon on the right with a plus sign on it, chose the usb drive. Virtualbox then installed driver for the USB drive. After it finished, booted the android VM. Started OpenManager, went to mnt/USB, and files of the usb drive were there!