USB transport

[Robert Bielik]

Hi all,

Has there been any work on using USB HID as a gRPC transport ? 

Regards

/Robert

[Mark D. Roth]

As far as I know, no one has requested this before, so it's not on our roadmap.

What is your use-case for this?  I'm not familiar with USB HID, but a quick web search indicates that it's for connecting things like keyboards and mice via USB, and it's not clear to me why you'd want to use gRPC for that.

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[Abhishek Parmar]

It is actually very useful for communicating with microcontrollers. We do something similar with just sending protobuf request responses using nanopb. Our microcontroller is resource limited so running the full grpc stack is not feasible on that side, but might be useful in other situations.

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-Abhishek

[Vijay Pai]

As Mark mentioned, it's not on our roadmap, but if you wanted to put one together, I can suggest https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/core/transport_explainer.md for an idea of what transports need to do. If the goal is a simple message-oriented transport without reference to complex flow control, I can suggest using the in-process transport as a model for how to build a transport, as it's only a few hundred lines of code and implements the transport ops required to actually have working RPCs for its context; this might make a lot of sense if your controller is memory-mapped. Alternatively, if your controller is mapped as a file, a path forward might be to make a new endpoint akin to the UDS endpoint. This would mean that you'd be speaking HTTP/2 over your HID, but again it may be a fairly simple integration.

Good luck!

- Vijay

[Robert Bielik]

Mark, as Abhishek mentioned, it is quite useful in cases where a target device (usually embedded) has no networking. Thanks Vijay, I'll have a look at your suggestions.

Regards

/Robert

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[Frédéric Martinsons]

Hello all,

Some years ago we had the exact same use case where we have an android application which drive an embedded devices (in USB Accessory Mode). The only way to communicate with this device is through USB channel and we wanted to use gRPC.

So we develop the USB transport channel in gRPC bask in 2018 (based on gRPC v1.13.0).

The guy from our teams that made these patches had now leaved but I'll be glad to submit a patch series if the USB support is still foreseen to be support but I may not be able to answer all the questions about tricks that came in this code.

Do you want to receive a merge request ?

Thanks for the good works gRPC guru.

On Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 17:18:21 UTC+1 robert...@gmail.com wrote:

Mark, as Abhishek mentioned, it is quite useful in cases where a target device (usually embedded) has no networking. Thanks Vijay, I'll have a look at your suggestions.

Regards

/Robert

2018-02-07 22:31 GMT+01:00 'Vijay Pai' via grpc.io <grp...@googlegroups.com>:

As Mark mentioned, it's not on our roadmap, but if you wanted to put one together, I can suggest https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/core/transport_explainer.md for an idea of what transports need to do. If the goal is a simple message-oriented transport without reference to complex flow control, I can suggest using the in-process transport as a model for how to build a transport, as it's only a few hundred lines of code and implements the transport ops required to actually have working RPCs for its context; this might make a lot of sense if your controller is memory-mapped. Alternatively, if your controller is mapped as a file, a path forward might be to make a new endpoint akin to the UDS endpoint. This would mean that you'd be speaking HTTP/2 over your HID, but again it may be a fairly simple integration.

Good luck!

- Vijay

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 8:51:23 PM UTC-8, Robert Bielik wrote:

Hi all,

Has there been any work on using USB HID as a gRPC transport ? 

Regards

/Robert

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[Frédéric Martinsons]

There is another thread talking about USB support: https://groups.google.com/g/grpc-io/c/MZCVUShRMkM/m/y3T_fs8iAQAJ but I cannot answer there since my messages are automatically deleted (don't know why)

[Frédéric Martinsons]

Anybody there ? 

I think I'll made the above mentionned merge request and we will see if it is accepted or not.

[Tom Stoffer]

Hi Frédéric

I would be interested in seeing this MR, we are looking at implementing something like this. Did your code get used in production?

Tom

[Frédéric Martinsons]

Hello Tom,

Two years ago, I managed to get an USB channel based on grpc 1.35 , you can see this work on my personal grpc fork: https://github.com/fmartinsons/grpc/tree/grpc-usb-1.35.0

Sadly, from what I remember, I didn't manage to make it work on my target machine (I got spurious USB disconnections).

I didn't have the time to continue and I don't plan to work on it again but feel free to get the code and try it by yourself.

I'd appreciate it greatly if you manage to have a working code and publish it.

Have a nice day.

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