Detecting attached USB devices under Mac OSX

Question

Hello,

First of all a statement: I'm a newbie when it comes to programming for the Mac. However I have an assignment which requires USB communication with a device so I thought I'll start with something basic.

I took the code from here, built it and ran it from the Terminal. It starts up and writes:

Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1351 and product ID=8193.
Starting run loop.

However after this, if I plug in and out USB devices (I tried: iPod, GPS, mouse) nothing gets written on the screen, although as much as I understand there should be whenever I connect and disconnect a device.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This sample code watches only devices matching the hard coded values vendor ID=1351 and product ID=8193.

If you want to watch for another device in particular, you have to pass the vendor and product ID as arguments to the command line.

Answer 2

You can also use system_profiler SPUSBDataType on a terminal

Answer 3

I found /Developer/Applications/Utilities/USB Prober to be of great use.