Introducing the Kitty USB Analyzer Version 1.2

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Copyright MMIV Steve Calfee


The Kitty USB Analyzer is a low cost USB bus analyzer. It provides full USB bus info for USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices running at low speed and full speed. High speed is not supported. Upgrade is available here for latest version: Version 1.2. This web site is intended to be the complete manual for the Kitty USB Analyzer. If you find a documentation or installation problem, email me and I will update the site. Web Browser User Interface Kitty USB Analyzer presents its information via 10baseT ethernet as a simple website for universal use. You can use any web browser on any system to control the Kitty USB Analyzer. This means you can use your favorite browser such as Internet Explorer or Opera or Mozilla on a Windows machine or even Lynx on a Linux or Unix machine. If you have a PDA or cell phone where you can browse the internet or your LAN, then you can use it with the Kitty USB Analyzer. Also, you already know the user interface and can use the familiar browser capabilities; like bookmarking frequently used Kitty USB Analyzer pages, or the search facility within a Kitty USB Analyzer generated trace page. This user interface being a web site is a major advantage to you the user. You can take just the Kitty USB Analyzer along to a remote site and use any computer already on the remote sites' LAN to use the full capability of the Kitty USB Analyzer. You can leave a Kitty USB Analyzer hooked up to a problem USB device and go to someone else's office on the LAN and access the Kitty USB Analyzer without having to install any new software on the browsers computer. Similarly, you can use an ethernet to WIFI bridge such as the Linksys WET11 and access the Kitty USB Analyzer via 802.11 wirelessly. This web page describes the Kitty USB Analyzer. It assumes you know what USB and logic analyzers are for. This page is to give you an idea of how the Kitty USB Analyzer works and how you use it debugging USB devices and hosts. The Kitty USB Analyzer is a device that uses a web server as a universally accessible development tool. The goal is to allow any html 4.0 browser to control the analyzer. On the actual hardware analyzer device, the web page is served by the Ubicom IP2022 Internet Processor, enabled with Ubicom's ipOS; and ipStack. Kitty USB Analyzer H/W picture: To see sample Kitty USB Analyzer generated web pages: You might ask, why samples, why isn't a real analyzer on-line? Good question! Nothing is to prevent you from having a analyzer on-line for remote diagnostics, or group debugging etc. You can also connect a Kitty USB Analyzer to a wireless access point or other ethernet to 802-11 bridge such as a Linksys WET11, so you can debug a wired USB connection via a LAN. If I did have a Kitty USB Analyzer on-line it might be confusing because of the concept of session state. All the current state is maintained internally to the the Kitty USB Analyzer , not by using cookies in the calling browser. The Kitty USB Analyzer has one, huge trace buffer which is not practical to keep per user/browser. This means that one user doing a search or filter or trace would alter the system state for all other users. The Kitty USB Analyzer design assumes one or a very few users are interacting with the Kitty USB Analyzer at one time.

Kitty USB Analyzer goes wireless

Since the Kitty USB Analyzer is browser based, you can easily hook it to a cheap ethernet to wireless bridge such as the Linksys WET11b shown here. You can also attach the Kitty USB Analyzer to a wireless router access point. Ethernet and a web interface sets you free to use any machine with a browser.

H/W description

The Kitty USB Analyzer is a complete embedded computer based on the Ubicom IP2022 processor. The computer contains 4 connections to the outside world. A power connection (AC 100-240volts and 50Hz to 60Hz power universal wall-wart), a 10-base-t ethernet connection and both A and B USB connectors. The H/W also contains 4Mbit (or 512k bytes) of off chip flash, 256K bytes of external Ram. The H/W functions as a web server with various CGI functions to handle dynamic data.

How does it work?

The Kitty USB Analyzer functions by being a wiretap on a USB line. It sits between a device or devices under test and either a computer usb port or a hub port. All bus transactions between the host and the device are sampled and stored in on board memory. When a trigger event occurs, the Kitty USB Analyzer will fill the remaining memory with samples. You use the web interface to look through the samples and see exactly what went on on the USB bus as well as the timings involved.

Triggering and Tracing

Tracing is data put in the trace buffer. If the memory is not full, the analyzer is always tracing. If a trigger has not occurred, tracing will continue even when memory fills up, by writing over the oldest traces. Everything that happens on the USB plus timing information is put in the trace buffer. This can be a huge amount of data, but display controls allow you to access just the data you want.

Triggering is when the trigger condition applies and post trigger traces are put in the trace buffer. Pre-Trigger is the maximum number of traces put into the trace buffer before the trigger is encountered. Pre-trigger will range from 0 to the selected maximum number of traces depending on when the trigger condition is encountered. What the pre-trigger does is protect a maximum number of traces before the trigger from being over written by later traces. Post-trigger is the number of traces put into the trace buffer after the trigger event.

Triggering criteria and trace display options are controlled from the configure web page. When encountered, the trigger will start the post-trigger tracing in the memory buffer. In addition you can trigger on any one or more of the 10 PIDs (SETUP SOF IN OUT DATA0 DATA1 ACK NAK STALL PRE). Triggering on nothing can be disappointing and glacially slow.

See the Kitty USB Analyzer Triggering and Tracing page

The Filter Trace Display

The Filter Trace Display section allows you to control what gets displayed to you after you have captured data in the trace buffer. The trace buffer is not altered, so you can look at the same data with different filter options. You can hide two of the data fields if you wish to reduce the amount of information displayed - the sync and sync timing field can be surpressed, and the byte offset in the trace buffer can also be suppressed.

You can also hide some kinds of packets that may clutter up your trace. You can hide: SOF PRE packets. You can also hide all FULL_speed or LOW_speed transactions. And finally you can hide NAKed transactions, so you can easily find the transactions handling data.

Select all the configure information you want and then press "configure trigger". This will present you with a display of what you selected as well as a URL you can add to your favorites to always configure a display this way.

See the Kitty USB Analyzer Triggering and Tracing page

Searching

A second configuration html page is to search for interesting items in the captured trace memory. Searches start at the beginning of the traces, at the last place searched to, or at the end of the trace buffer (for backward searches).

Searches can be run forward from the currently selected spot, or backward.

There are two things that can be searched for:

One or more PIDs (USB speak for packet IDs, which start every packet)
A specific bus condition, ie SE0, SE1, Full speed or Low speed

Some of the PID searches can contain additional search items: SETUP, IN, OUT all can also require a specific address or endpoint.

See the Kitty USB Analyzer search page

FORMAT of trace display description

frame # 456

f=11999 sync 2684 SOF(xa5) frame 456 crc5 0x14 f=0 f=00039 sync 2692 SETUP(x2d) addr 2 endp 0 crc5 0x15 f=00076 sync 2692 DATA0(xc3) 0x80 0x06 0x00 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x12 0x00 crc=0xf4e0 f=00178 sync 2692 ACK(xd2)

The first field in the table gives you the USB frame number where the bus activity took place. The field is also a link: frame # 456 Click on the frame number link to start the browser display with this frame. The "f=11999_sync" gives the number of USB full speed bit times since the preceding SOF. It is accurate to +-3 bit times. It includes the data transfer which has no gaps, the EOP time and in between packet idle times. The counter is reset every SOF (see the f=0 at the end of the SOF line?). So to calculate the timing of the above SETUP packet, the time from it's sync to the DATA0 line is 76-39=37 bit times. We know from the USB spec that a SETUP packet is 4 bytes long, including 8 bits of sync, 8 bits of PID 11 bits of addr/endp and 5 bits of crc5. This totals 32 bit times. Then an EOP takes about 2 bit times and must be followed by 1 or more idle times. In this case there were 3 idle usb clocks between packets. There is some jitter in the timing being done on the Kitty USB Analyzer, so some sync timings are +-3 bit times. See the Kitty USB Analyzer Triggering and Tracing page to see how to remove the "sync" field from the display if you choose.

The decimal number between sync and the PID name is an index into the Kitty USB Analyzer sample buffer. The Kitty USB Analyzer cgi routines use this offset to start at specific places in the trace memory. See the Kitty USB Analyzer Triggering and Tracing page to see how to remove the "byte offset" field from the display if you choose.

The next field is the text name of the PID and the hex number for that PID (ie. SOF(xa5) or SETUP(x2d) etc.)

The data field is presented as defined by the packet PID. If the packet contains data, the crc captured is printed. If the crc or crc5 is bad, the crc field is printed in RED (ie CRC_ERROR!_crc=0xf4e1)

If a frame of data takes more than one tcp packet, another table entry is created for more data and that new table entry will have the same frame # xxx.

Field upgrade the Kitty USB Analyzer

There are two ways to upgrade the Kitty USB Analyzer in the field. First there is a web upload capability found on the ipOS Status web page. Second the Kitty USB Analyzer supports tftp as an upgrade method, where a tftp client running on your PC sends an upgrade image file to the Kitty USB Analyzer via ethernet. When enhancements and bug fixes are done for the Kitty USB Analyzer, the new upgrade image will be posted here on the website so you can always have the latest and greatest software.

Future Kitty USB Analyzer add-ons: Little-Woolly-Lamb Serial Data Analyzer

Someday, I will have a "pod" add-on that will plug into the Kitty USB Analyzer "B" USB socket, called the Little-Woolly-Lamb Serial Data Analyzer. This pod will contain clips that will allow you to connect up to a non-USB serial bus for capture. The current plan is to support I2c, SMB, SPI, 1wire and rs232 sampling serial data at rates up to 1 Mhz. If the protocol supports framing and addressing, acks and naks that will be also displayed. Let me know if you think one of these non-USB serial busses are of interest to you.

Installing and configuring Kitty USB Analyzer

The Kitty USB Analyzer is a server that needs to be configured to your network/ethernet situation.

You need to give your Kitty USB Analyzer a fixed IP address and subnet mask compatible with your internal network (or just your PC network adapter). You need to connect either a CAT-5 crossover cable (not supplied) to directly connect to your PC network adapter card, or a regular CAT-5 cable (not supplied) to connect to your hub/switch/router/WAP.
Power up Kitty USB Analyzer. Then you need to configure your PC so it can talk to the Kitty USB Analyzer, WRITE DOWN YOUR CURRENT SETTINGS so that later in step 4 you can reset your PC to the real IP settings for your network. The settings your Kitty USB Analyzer was shipped with are: Kitty USB Analyzer Network Configuration. Your Kitty USB Analyzer MAC address will be different! To configure the Kitty USB Analyzer, change your PC's IP address to somewhere on the 192.168.0.x subnet where x is not 192 (default Kitty USB Analyzer address), not 255 and not 1. Do not use an IP address that conflicts with another PC or TCP/IP device on your network during configuration. Once you have changed your client PC IP address and the subnetwork mask (255.255.255.0) to match the Kitty USB Analyzer, you should be able to connect using any browser to the default address by typing the following into the browsers URL window: "http://192.168.0.192/". If you get the Kitty USB Analyzer home page, which is very similar to the top of this page, you are nearly done!
In your browser, follow the links from the Kitty USB Analyzer home page ->ipOS status->Network Configuration. Now you can set a new IP and subnetwork mask to match your network. If you have multiple subnets in your location, you can set the GatewayIP to your subnet router's IP address. Then anything on the local net can access Kitty USB Analyzer, even if it is not on the same subnet. When you click the "write" button, you will notice the link light goes out on the Kitty USB Analyzer and then quickly comes back on. At this point the new Kitty USB Analyzer IP address is active.
Restore your PC to your own network configuration. You can now access the Kitty USB Analyzer by sending your browser to http:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (which you just set the Kitty USB Analyzer too)!
If you forgot what address you gave the Kitty USB Analyzer, you can reset it to its defaults as described: Kitty USB Analyzer Network Configuration.

Questions: kitty.help@neteze.com

More info about Kitty USB Analyzer

Kitty USB Analyzer international power supply

The Kitty USB Analyzer power supply accepts most international voltages (100VAC-240VAC) and 50Hz-60Hz.Picture of Kitty USB Analyzer power supply. It is a "powerstrip" sized plugin that takes the same space as one normal plug. For outside USA use, you may need to obtain a converter for the plug that goes into the wall. The Kitty USB Analyzer uses AC power rather than using the USB bus power so it does not affect the system under test (USB bus supplied power consumption is strictly limited by the USB 2.0 standard).

**FAQ**
What is the impact (from a practical point of view) of the lack of support for high speed in your analyzer?	Well, you can't use it for high speed. If your host controller does not support high speed then this does not matter at all. If you are bringing up a new hardware core for high speed USB you probably need a much more expensive high speed USB analyzer.If you are trying to tie a high speed device to a high speed host and want to use a low cost analyzer like the Kitty USB Analyzer, you will need to put a full speed (only) hub between your host and the device. All high speed devices are supposed to fall back to full speed in this kind of topology.
Initially we need to support flash memory devices and usb floppy drives. is your analyzer appropriate?	Sure, it traces all full speed and low speed bus transactions.
Do you know of any books or docs that are written for real engineers and deal with the real world issues (timing and compatibility, for example) that are encountered when adding a usb host controller to an embedded system?	There is lots of stuff on the web about USB see: http://www.lvr.com/usb.htm Jan's books have a good reputation.There are lots of books on USB, but most of them seem to just restate the spec, and sometimes add errors. The spec is a free download from www.usb.org - it is accurate and readable.
USB is new to us (I did a simple usb device a couple of years ago (using a ti chip) but nobody has done any host work). we have many electrical and software engineers, many of them with, literally, decades of experience. we are looking for real world circuits and code type advice, not something like "an idiots guide to usb".	Personally, I would not bother with a book. Just get the spec and use the web. The Linux usb mailing list is very active: List-Archive: linux-usb-devel.
What is the deal with USB traffic when I am downstream of a hub?	Well that is complicated. If you have a full/low speed device on a port of a usb 2.0 high speed hub you will see only full or low speed traffic. This is very convenient for using a Kitty USB Analyzer. In general, connect your device on the bus so that only traffic to your device under test will arrive. That way you can see everything that is going on with your device, not other transfers on the bus. The Kitty USB Analyzer will work with any full/low speed traffic but it may be confusing for debugging. Many root hubs (the USB connectors directly on your computer) switch to a companion full speed root hub and may send other USB traffic on the downstream leg where you have your Kitty USB Analyzer connected. If you have a high speed host on your computer you can connect your device through a high speed hub and you will only see traffic to your device. If you are connected to a high speed root hub you may see the same traffic as downstream on a full speed hub. That is, you will see all downstream traffic. But the USB spec says that you will not see upstream traffic unless you are between the device and the hub port. So traffic going out from a port will be seen, but traffic going upstream is not visible. Mainly you should avoid this topology.
How can I look at enumeration descriptors other than decoding them myself with the usb spec.	One advantage of a text based output such as HTML is that you can use text programs to process data. This is normal in the Unix/Linux world, but rarer in Windows. So until the decode is contained in the Kitty USB Analyzer itself, you can do a trace, save the capture to a file - all browsers support this. Download a recent gawk version for your OS from gawk download or http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gawk.htm. After you get gawk and put it in your systems "path" - download this zip file which contains 4 small files. It contains a windows .bat file that will given a basefilename -that does not include an extension (but the file must have the extension .html on any OS) will generate a couple of temporary files and finally a "basefilename_decode.txt" filename. So then you can look at the enumeration decoding evaluation. Feel free to enhance the decoder, it is all available as AWK source. As you can tell by examining the AWK source programs high level protocols are complicated - the early SETUP protocols are documented in the USB spec - but the later ones are complicated and full of bugs. One thing that greatly complicates decoding of much later setup transactions in some protocols is the requirement to know what went earlier - during enumeration.
What are those big slide switches on the Kitty USB Analyzer pcb?	They allow future capabilities. The pcb can have new software downloaded into it at any time to reconfigure the software, but to reconfigure the hardware I added the switches. For use as a Kitty USB Analyzer, the switches should be set to "analyzer", "device", "full". They will never be changed while it is in use as a USB bus analyzer, regardless of the speeds (FULL or LOW) of the devices on the USB bus. The switches might have to be switched when the Kitty USB Analyzer is used as Little-Woolly-Lamb Serial Data Analyzer. Someday, if I was to do a host or device emulator for USB testing, the switches would have to be switched to new configurations.
Is it possible to have Kitty USB Analyzer stream data to a socket to be recorded instead of being displayed on a web page.	Well, sort of. It is possible to communicate via wget and wget/post to get data into and out of the kitty. So it is possible to use in a script rather than a browser. However, the current device has no pure socket interface for a tcp client/server connection other than via http. Even if there was a socket interface, the 10-baseT 10Mbit connection via ethernet cannot in the worst case keep up with a busy 12Mbit USB full speed bus. The kitty uses a 128K byte circular buffer to hold sampled USB data. A trigger happens for a bus event you choose, and then the ram buffer is frozen for display via http. Think of the Kitty as a digital camera that takes large snapshots of the USB bus data. It is not a "movie" camera.
When I go to the "status" pages, it displays whatever I asked and then quickly "refreshes" with a page containing only the USB "buttons". It looks like this is "almost intentional".	Yes, it is intentional. It was dealing with the browser based interface having a problem waiting for a trigger. A web server cannot send something to a browser without the browser asking first. Say you wanted to trigger on an "ACK" pid on the USB bus. Then watching some device, say a mouse it would not trigger until the mouse moved or was clicked. However the browser could time out after a while waiting for the trigger. So after a "trace again" request, the "standard header" is displayed showing one of the 8 links as "force trigger". This standard header uses the HTML auto update tag for 5 seconds. This causes the browser to poll the Kitty for this same page, which is cgi generated. When a trigger does occur (and most of the time it is before the first display of this header), "force trigger" is changed to "View Trigger". "View Trigger" is the indication that a trigger has occurred. If the trigger has not occurred, this page will auto update every 5 seconds until it does occur. You can always press "force trigger" to stop the auto update, the trace buffer will just show the static bus state usually SE0 or floating or USB bus transactions that did not satisfy the trigger condition.
Which browser works best with Kitty USB Analyzer?	It is supposed to work with all browsers. If you find one that does not work, please let me know. As a side note on Winxp, Internet Explorer seems to run much slower than Opera or Firefox because it waits until an entire page is downloaded before displaying anything. The other browsers seem much faster because the immediately make the start of a trace visible. This is usually only visible if you are requesting all 128K of traces to be displayed on one page (which translate to about 2+ Megabytes of html) selected on the "Set Trace Colors" page.

Kitty USB Analyzer latest version: Version 1.2

Updates are here for the Kitty USB Analyzer. You can download to your PC any of the following versions, a new version should not change the network settings you have set into your Kitty USB Analyzer, it should just change how the Kitty USB Analyzer functions. If you do not like an upgrade, you can always reload an earlier version. To upload a new version from your PC to a Kitty USB Analyzer you can use tftp to upload a file to the Kitty USB Analyzer. Most people will use the web interface to upload the new version to the Kitty USB Analyzer. From the Kitty USB Analyzer "home" page, go to "ipOS Status" and then go to "File System Upload" where you can "browse" your way to the new upgrade file.

Version 1.2:

Fixes a bug where the Kitty USB Analyzer would hang when selecting a frame #xxx link and the only traces were bus state info such as " BUS timeout 100ms idle FS " . Introduced in version 1.1 and the only solution was to power off.
Kitty USB Analyzer version 1.2

Version 1.1:

Fixes a displayed only problem where after resetting to the default IP it also reset the display to the default MAC address. It did not change the MAC address, but the display was incorrect.
Fixes a bug where the bus state during inactivity is not correctly reported/displayed.
fixes the display so that a reset bus is reported as "bus reset" and other possible bus states "full speed idle", "low speed idle" and SE1 are correctly reported.
Fixes a problem where if data being transferred contained the flag fields that indicated a new packet, the display would be garbled. Now I think it shows all possible packets correctly.
Fixes a bug where if NAKs are suppressed from trace memory (to save memory) IN/NAK sequences are properly suppressed but OUT/DATA/NAK suppressed only the DATA/NAK, not the OUT PID. NAK suppression is selected in the "triggering and tracing" page.
Fixes "View Prev Page" to properly find a real PID to start the trace display.
Kitty USB Analyzer version 1.1

Original version: Kitty USB Analyzer version 1.0

Sample Traces

These show the enumeration of the same device by two windows operating systems. Note that SEO means the bus is in reset, counted in 10ms time frames. The complete enumeration for winxp for this device is much larger due to the huge number of NAKs issued by the hardware while the very slow device does something. Note that filtering both the display and the trace can make this huge amount of information much more usable.

win98_enum_of_zoom_full_speed_modem.html

winxp_enum_of_zoom_full_speed_modem.html