Check if specific USB-device is available

Question

I need to find out if a USB device with a special Vendor/Product ID is available (I only wat to check if it exists, no access is necessary). When using libusb-win32 this can be done only for these devices that have a libusb driver/filter driver installed which would not work in my case.

So...is there a possibility to enumerate all available USB-devices and to get their VID/PID? Any example codes available for that?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to archive it by WMI queries, for example to get SN of plugged USB pen drives (if they have it, some doesn't).

Check WMI Win32_PNPEntity class or Win32_USBHub, Win32_USBControllerDevice classes.

EDIT:

For enumerating all devices, remove the WHERE clause:

using System;
using System.Management;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace WMISample
{
    public class MyWMIQuery
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            try
            {
                ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = 
                    new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2", 
                    "SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity WHERE DeviceID = 'USB\\VID_8087&PID_0024\\5&38CA7A24&0&1'"); 

                foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
                    Console.WriteLine("Win32_PnPEntity instance");
                    Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
                    Console.WriteLine("DeviceID: {0}", queryObj["DeviceID"]);
                }
            }
            catch (ManagementException e)
            {
                MessageBox.Show("An error occurred while querying for WMI data: " + e.Message);
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

You don't need drivers/filters installed to enumerate devices or find one with specific Vendor/Product ID.

libusb-win32 was subsumed by libusbx which was reabsorbed by libusb.

If you check libusb.info then you'll find up-to-date ports of the official libusb for Linux, MacOSX and Windows. (No need to use separate libusb-win32).

The distro comes with an example called listdevs which lists all connected devices (filter or no) by Vendor/Product ID. I checked both Linux (Ubuntu 12.10) and Win32 (Windows 7 Pro) and it works identically on both.