Building Alex Taradov’s open-source USB sniffer #USB #ReverseEngineering #Debugging @dt_db
A couple of months ago, Doug Brown stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov. Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps support. This one costs about $50 in parts to assemble yourself.
I actually have an Ellisys USB Tracker 110b that I bought on eBay many years ago, but it only does low-/full-speed decoding. I thought this would be a good opportunity to upgrade my capabilities to also be able to handle high-speed USB sniffing, while also providing some good soldering practice.
Here’s my (very long) video about the process of building up one of these and programming it. I left in all the mistakes I made along the way.
Why would I buy (or make) a hardware USB sniffer when Wireshark already has software USBPcap support in Windows? Where hardware sniffers come in handy is if you’re a firmware developer who is diagnosing a problem with a USB device or host you’re creating, or maybe you’re a driver developer working on a driver for a USB host controller.
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