Get HID Report Descriptors with “win-hid-dump” & “mac-hid-dump”

I help support the USB HID projects hidapi and node-hid. One of the aspects of HID that isn’t clear is that HID devices transmit and receive data with “reports”, fixed-size data packets. What reports a device responds to is described by the HID Report Descriptor it hands to the OS. The OS then only permits those reports to be sent and received. This descriptor is different from the USB Config & Device Descriptors Those two are easily discoverable using standard system tools, but for whatever reason, getting HID Report Descriptors is much harder.

To address this, I’ve created two tools: win-hid-dump and mac-hid-dump from code snippets around the Net. They are akin to simplified versions of usbhid-dump for Linux. They print the HID Report Descriptors of the HID devices currently connected and the output can be parsed by things like https://eleccelerator.com/usbdescreqparser/

The tool repos with pre-compiled releases:

I’ve found many of the issues I have in supporting node-hid is getting people to understand that you need to know the type and sizes of the reports you want. Hopefully they’ll be useful to others as well. Let me know if you have any issues with them.

The output looks something like:

tod@demo ~/Downloads/mac-hid-dump$ ./mac-hid-dump
mac-hid-dump:
16C0 0486:  - Teensyduino RawHID Device
DESCRIPTOR:
  06  c9  ff  09  04  a1  5c  75  08  15  00  26  ff  00  95  40
  09  75  81  02  95  20  09  76  91  02  95  04  09  76  b1  02
  c0
  (33 bytes)
16C0 0486:  - Teensyduino RawHID Device
DESCRIPTOR:
  06  ab  ff  0a  00  02  a1  01  75  08  15  00  26  ff  00  95
  40  09  01  81  02  95  40  09  02  91  02  c0
  (28 bytes)
27B8 01ED: ThingM - blink(1) mk3
DESCRIPTOR:
  06  ab  ff  0a  00  20  a1  01  15  00  26  ff  00  75  08  85
  01  95  08  09  00  b2  02  01  75  08  85  02  95  3c  09  00
  b2  02  01  c0
  (36 bytes)
tod@demo ~/Downloads/mac-hid-dump$

3 Replies to “Get HID Report Descriptors with “win-hid-dump” & “mac-hid-dump””

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *