Chapter 8. Universal Serial Bus - USB

Now, it's time to take a look at the Universal Serial Bus, that is, a versatile bus widely used in modern PCs that allows people to connect an electronic device to a computer. For instance, a hard disk, a keyboard, or a serial device (as seen in the previous chapter) can be all connected to a computer through the same USB port.

After a brief introduction about what this bus is and how it works, we'll show you the different types of USB devices and how they are supported in the Linux kernel. We'll see how our embedded kits can act as USB hosts in order to manage a barcode reader and how we can use the BeagleBone Black as a USB device in order to exchange data with a host PC. In this case, we will show the multi gadget and the configfs one which allows the developer to switch between different functions dynamically.