Pulse’s ADB (Android Debug Bridge) fix.

I have been cracking my head to get the adb to detect my Pulse correctly since last Saturday. The latest adb in Eclair 2.0 SDK doesn’t seem to detect Pulse properly (broken?). It keeps returning the incorrect serial number whereas in Eclipse, Pulse is not being detected at all thus making the debugging process such a difficult task. I decided to fix this problem by myself since I couldn’t find any solution from the Android developer group. Plus, I just want to get things done faster.

Pulse is a relatively new Android hardware manufactured by Huawei. As stated in the Android guide, the USB vendor id for Huawei is 12d1. Issuing the dmesg command will confirm this information.

sudo dmesg

The first identifier (0×12d1) shows that the Huawei Pulse is connected.

USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 0x12d1 0x1501 0x100

Get the Cupcake (1.5) SDK and replace the Eclair (2.0) SDK. I didn’t try this fix using Donut (1.6) SDK though. Next go into the .android directory and edit the adb_usb.ini file. Add the vendor id string (0×12d1) at the end of the file. Save and close.

# ANDROID 3RD PARTY USB VENDOR ID LIST -- DO NOT EDIT.
# USE 'android update adb' TO GENERATE.
# 1 USB VENDOR ID PER LINE.
0x12d1

Restart the adb server

adb kill-server
adb start-server

…and re-list the device and access the shell.

adb devices
adb shell

The adb should now return a slightly different serial number (ignore the funny characters.. adb would never return the correct serial number for Pulse). But what important to me is that, Eclipse can now detect the Cupcake 1.5 API on Pulse, allowing me to debug my application directly onto Pulse. Coffee break!

Please be informed that this quick fix was done using Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) on Mac OS X 10.6. Under some circumstances, Eclipse may report that the target API on Pulse is unknown. Should this happen, restart the adb server.

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