Kithara USB Toolkit

Kithara USB Toolkit

Function Library for USB Driver Development

Kithara USB Toolkit provides all important function mechanisms for the development of USB device drivers. By using the comprehensive and simply applicable API, access from the ordinary programming environment to the hardware components is possible as if a real device driver was developed with huge effort.

Kithara USB Toolkit is a tool, which provides convenient development of USB drivers for Windows. It is also possible to develop drivers for external USB hardware, without initial training of the complex kernel programming. Programming languages like C, C++, Delphi or C# are directly supported and the developers can work in their familiar programming environment during the entire development. Kithara USBToolkit provides a generic driver, which enables the developers a direct communication to USB devices.

For further information see Kithara Driver Collection. An individual combination of the function modules as well as real-time capability is provided by Kithara RealTime Suite.

Technical details

  • Communication with USB devices via USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 at application or kernel level
  • Supports devices with several interfaces and several configurations
  • Reaction at kernel level to all plug and play and power management events as well as to received data
  • Transmission and reception rountines can be executed directly from a real-time context
  • Arbitrary device names, e. g. for serial interfaces
  • Generic WDM-driver for plug and play installation included
  • Unlimited distribution of the runtime files
  • Code execution on the kernel-level supported by C, C++ and Delphi
USB in real time

Modules

Kithara USB Toolkit consists of following modules, which provide only the mentioned real-time capabilities if the module is part of Kithara RealTime Suite.

Basic Functions

Base/Kernel Module

  • Supports the following operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (32 bit and 64 bit) as well as Windows Server 2016, 2019 and 2022, each with Dedicated Mode
  • Supports multi-core processors, Hyper-threading and NUMA multi-processor PCs
  • Functions for: opening the driver, execution of real-time code at kernel level, real-time memory management, device handling, version information, debugging support, system information
  • Real-time tasks, events, callbacks, shared memory, data and message pipes, fast mutex objects

Further information …

Timer Module

  • Determining the system time in different time and user-specific formats, resolution up to 0.1 μs
  • Highly accurate short time delays
  • Long-term synchronization of system clocks, synchronization with EtherCAT Distributed Clocks (DC) and IEEE 1588
  • Creation of simple Windows timers

Further information …

Communication

Device Module

  • Includes a Windows programming interface for communication devices (ReadFile, WriteFile, DeviceIoControl)
  • Any device names possible, for example virtual COM ports

Further information …

USB Driver Module

  • Communication with USB devices up to and including USB 3.1 via Windows driver stack
  • Low, full, high-speed
  • Control, bulk, interrupt and isochronous transfers
  • Response to all plug and play and power management events

Further information …

Platforms

Real-time capability can only be achieved on the kernel level. For this purpose a programming language is required that is able to generate native machine code, e. g. C, C++ or Delphi and others. Nevertheless Kithara RealTime Suite supports various platforms, for example a .NET environment. The solution is to transfer the time-critical code into a DLL, which will be loaded directly into the real-time context at the kernel level. A number of usable program frameworks for the aforementioned platforms are provided with every software purchase.

System Requirements

The products of Kithara RealTime Suite support a wide range of hardware and software combinations. If you have questions regarding the system support, please contact us!

Operating system

The software supports the following operating systems:

  • Windows 10 and 11 (32 bit and 64 bit), dedicated mode
  • Windows Server 2016, 2019 and 2022, dedicated mode

Hardware

The software runs on the following hardware:

  • CPU: AMD (Athlon) or Intel (Pentium 2), 32 or 64 bit
  • Dual- or multi-core; optional hyper-threading with multi-core, currently up to 48 logical CPUs, above on request
  • ACPI recommended (Advanced Control and Power Interface)
  • the PC must be able to support PAE (Page Address Extension)
  • Gigabit-Ethernet up to 100 Gbit/s, almost every controller of Intel and RealTek is supported

Compiler

Immediately usable program frameworks for the following programming languages / compilers are included in the supplied software (other programming languages can be supported on request):

  • Visual Studio 20xx C++ with MFC user interface (provided project files: VS 2010/12/13/15/17/19/22)
  • C++ Builder (Embarcadero, formerly Borland) VCL user interface
  • Delphi (Embarcadero, formerly Borland) VCL user interface
  • Visual Studio 20xx C# with WPF user interface (incl. C++ DLL for real-time execution, provided project files: VS 2010/12/13/15/17/19/22)

In order to execute code in a real-time context, any compiler that can generate a DLL with native machine code, is generally usable. Furthermore, the Windows application can also be generated with other programming languages, such as C#.

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