How to emulate USB devices?

Question

The rest of my team will make for my application a simple non-standard USB microphone, but until they finish it I will have to emulate it, for integration testing purposes.

1. Is there any risk in a physical loopback? Yes there is
2. Will a physical loopback work? Only with an USB bridge
3. There is any way to create a logical loopback? (MSDN has something about this)
4. There is any general purpose USB emulator software?

In case there is many options available I'd rather work it .NET/Matlab/Python solutions.

Answer 1

I strongly recommend this project, USB IP. It is a way of connecting USB devices over the network. Recently, they added a Windows client.

What this means is, you install the client on your Windows computer. This device then expects to talk to a USB device connected to a Linux computer, the server:

What you now do, is either create a fake device driver for Linux, that pretends to be connected to a USB device, but in reality is just logic pretending to be your USB device. There are tutorials for writing USB drivers for Linux. Or you create your own stub driver for the Device Control Manager (see picture above).

The DSF USB Loopback Device mentioned in the question itself, would be the same kind of solution as a stub driver for the Device Control Manager, but taking Linux out of the picture altogether.