How to access USB ports in java

Question

I'm trying to write a java application that accesses the usb ports to read from and write to a device connected through usb. The problem I face is that I don't know what exactly to use in java to do such a thing. I searched online and found something called JUSB but all the posts seem fairly old.

Currently I'm using the RXTX libraries but I sometimes run into some sync error. When I use C# to do the equivalent it requires far less code and I don't face any of the same sync error.

My question is, is there anything built into the latest version of the JRE I can use to access the usb ports (that is just as easy as the equivalent C# code)?

Solution 1

There is nothing equivalent to C#'s USB support in Java. Both jUSB and Java-USB are severely out-of-date and likely unusable for any serious application development.

If you want to implement a cross-platform USB application, really your best bet is to write an abstract JNI interface that talks to Linux, Mac and Windows native libraries that you'll have to write yourself. I'd look at LibUSB to handle Mac and Linux. Windows, as you've seen, is pretty straightforward. I just came off a year-long project that did just this, and unfortunately this is the only serious cross-platform solution. If you don't have to implement on Windows and your needs are limited, you may get by with one of the older Java libs (jUSB or Java-USB). Anything that needs to deploy on Win32/Win64 will need a native component.

Solution 2

Been using usb4java for a year on cross platfom (Linux and Windows) and it works great.

See:

http://usb4java.org/

They are very active and have a very good javax USB front.

Solution 3

See the jUSB or usb4java libraries.

Solution 4

You might want to have a look at usb4java - http://usb4java.org/index.html it appears to support Windows, Linux and Mac OS's and appears to be reasonably current at the time of posting. Is unfortunately under the LGPL so may not be suitable for commercial development.

Solution 5

The Java Communications API. This should provide similar functionality to the C# System.IO.Ports namespace.

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