Are vendor-specific USB serial adapters supported in Metro apps?

Question

There's a sample provided for CDC compliant USB devices here. Are vendor-specific USB devices supported too? Or are CDC compliant USB devices the only ones supported in Metro apps?

Your help is much appreciated!!

Answer 1

Vendor specific USB to UART bridge devices will not be supported under CDC, only a USB CDC class device would be supported in that case.

However, since Microsoft has opened up a USB API you could still access vendor specific devices. The downside here is that the devices will not look like a COM port, you would need to use the Windows.Devices.Usb namespace to access the device directly through it's USB protocol. This means that the vendor for a specific device would need to publish their protocol, or you could reverse engineer or use the Linux source as an example of what the setup packets for certain commands should look like.

Since you're using an FTDI converter you can get the device protocol information from their Linux Source (this is from 3.13 kernel) and use this to access the device through Windows RT.

Answer 2

FTDI might support Win RT in the future (today is 2014-Apr-15), you can ask for a beta driver here: Windows RT Driver