Downloading FTDI dive log using desktop Subsurface on Android

[Anton Lundin]

On 07 February, 2017 - Willem Ferguson wrote:

> I am working with the Android version of Subsurface desktop and
> attempting download of dive logs from a FTDI dive computer.
> 
> Hardware issues:
> 
> Firstly, the Tusa does not turn into PC download mode if the USB bus
> does not supply power. Possibly on this phone the mini-USB plug does
> not supply power to devices. Therefore, connect the Android USB plug
> to a USB hub that supplies power to all connected devices. This
> connection actually is via mini-USB to full-sized US cable, through
> a female/female USB adaptor-plug and another cable to the USB hub.
> The Tusa DC USB plug is plugged into the USB hub via yet another
> cable. With this setup, at least, the Tusa DC goes into download
> mode.
> 
> Secondly tested most of this cable setup by download onto the Linux
> desktop using the custom FTDI driver and using the USB hub to supply
> power to the Tusa DC. Download works perfectly (i.e. with some
> ideosyncracies that Anton has already seen, dealing with cylinder
> gas composition, maybe a libdivecomputer issue. These are not
> relevant now). Fact is download works well onto Linux.
> 

As far as I've remember, thats a libdivecomputer issue. You should
probably send a trace log to Jef and he can help us figure out whats
going on. Maybe I've done something stupid in the custom-serial layer
which corrupts the data, or maybe its a parsing error in
libdivecomputer. Anyway, we probably need Jef's help to figure that one
out.

> Android driver configuration:
> 
> When downloading dives onto the Anfroid device, I get an error
> message "Insufficient privileges to open the device ftdi Tusa (Zen
> (IQ-900))". This is the same error message that I get if downloading
> to Linux and I have not chown-ed the USB port or I did not build
> Subsurface-desktop with -DFTDISUPPORT=ON on the cmake command line.
> This does not necessarily mean that on Android it is exactly the
> same reason as on Linux. In android/build.sh, it looks like
> FTDISUPPORT is pretty much hard-wired into the cmake command line.
> Possibly the Android port also needs some configuration, for
> instance performed using chown on Linux?
> 
> Any comments?

The permissions handling and device node open is done in a completely
different way on Android.

All the usb vid/pid's we support needs to be listed in the manifest.
Make sure the vid/pid for your usb-chip is listed in
android/res/xml/device_filter.xml


The ftdi on android code is as far as I've know compliant with the
android sdk/ndk api's, and doesn't really use anything it shouldn't. 
That said, there might be something in the I've missed, which breaks on
a specific vendor implementation of hal/usb on some devices. There might
also be something that broke in newer Android version. Last time I
tested this was on a Nexus 5 running ... KitKat or Lollipop.

My current phone is seriously b0rked, and doesn't do USB-OTG so I can't
really test it. I'd might need to borrow my wife's phone and see if that
can be tricked into doing USB-OTG and test the ftdi code on.

I could probably test it in a emulator to, but that hal is probably even
simpler and more standard so I bet it already works there. Goldfish ftw.


//Anton - there's some complexity to this...


-- 
Anton Lundin	+46702-161604