USB - lower level and programming

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✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Related to coding

Can I give my DIY device a custom name?

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

tl;dr:

not really, at least not easily

To get it to look distinct, you would really need a distinct VID-and-PID, and registration of such.

This would mostly just matter to what is shown in device manager.

This might be nice for the convenience of admins.

Or, in theory, to avoid getting confused which of the many attached Arduinos you need to upload to, except that the name for a device is essentially settled by its VID and PID, so that won't work.

What you probably don't want

In Windows there is a registry trick to effectively override the name reported by a driver - but that would be for all devices that that driver applies to, so won't help you distinguish one arduino from another, nor will it make your "make my project look distinct".

(you don't need to alter the driver itself, just the INF around it[1] which is within reach. Also, it will not do that on anyone else's PC.)

If you are a company

Even if

• you can get a lot of USB-capable microcontrollers to communicate arbitrary VID and PID,

• you can register it somewhere (without paying a lot of money)

...then it is now a new, unknown device, and now you would have to supply your own drivers.

If you want automatic installation in Windows, you then also have to deal with Microsoft driver certification[2].

This is probably only interesting for people who own a company and want to sell the result.

There's an inbetween if you can get people to accept your own custom drivers, but it is fidgety.

I have seen installers do this to their devices.