Project Goal

The goal of this Google Summer of Code 2010 project is to have some hardware USB sniffer on the Beagle Board. The host PC is connected on the slave USB port of the Beagle Board, and the device to be analysed on the host port of the Beagle Board.

The goal is to have a completely transparent solution to forward USB packets from the host PC to the device (and back), while logging the data: that is, neither the host PC nor the device must be able to realise that there is a sniffer in the middle, intercepting packets.

Software solutions to capture packets already exist (e.g., USB Snoopy on Windows, USB monitor on Linux), but a hardware solution would have the advantage of:

• Not requiring any software modification
• Supporting proprietary OSes, where you may not have access to the software
• Allowing debugging of a new USB stack: If, let's say, you are developing a new USB stack for your preferred operating system, any software logging solution would obviously be as reliable as the stack you are currently developing, hence the usefulness of a hardware solution.
• Depending on the capabilities of the OTG and EHCI chips, being able to capture USB frames at a lower level, and maybe monitor for transmission errors for example.