Fixing the Google Android USB driver to work with the NOOK Color ADB on Windows

Symptoms

When attaching a Barnes & Noble NOOK Color to a Windows computer for app development, Windows is not able to automatically install a device driver that allows ADB to communicate with the NOOK Color.

You may see a message similar to the following:

“Device driver software was not successfully installed” (with details: “No driver found”)

Further, once the driver is installed, the NOOK Color may not show up in the ADB list of devices.

Resolution

With a small amount of driver hacking, you can get the standard Google Android USB driver to work with the NOOK Color. The modification you’ll make is clear; no downloading and installing of driver packages or batch files from spurious sources.

Prerequisites

• You have Google Android SDK and the Google USB Driver.
  Directions for downloading the Google USB driver are here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/win-usb.html (Do not follow the instructions for “Installing the USB Driver”, yet!)

Steps

Assuming your Android SDK is at C:\android-sdk-windows\…

1. Modify the USB Driver INF to recognize the NOOK Color

1. Open the USB Driver INF, C:\android-sdk-windows\extras\google\usb_driver\android_winusb.inf, in a text editor.
2. Add the following lines anywhere in both of the “[Google.NTx86]” and “[Google.NTamd64]” sections (yes, add these lines twice):
   

   ;B & N Nook Color
   %SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_2080&PID_0002
   %CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_2080&PID_0002&MI_01

3. Save the file

2. Tell Windows to use this driver for your NOOK Color

Follow the “Installing the USB Driver” directions at: http://developer.android.com/sdk/win-usb.html, with the following adjustments…

• If you’re following steps where it says to locate the device (such as “Android Phone”), you should find the device as “NookColor” under “Other Devices.”
• Windows will show a warning along the lines of “Windows can’t verify the publisher of this driver software.” Click to “Install this driver software anyway”; this is simply because we modified the driver slightly to recognize the NOOK Color as an Android device. (You can find a similar message about this warning on the above Android page that corroborates this.)

Your NOOK Color should now be recognized by Windows!

3. Getting ADB to recognize your NOOK Color

We simply need to add the B&N vendor ID to the list of IDs that ADB recognizes as vendors that make Android devices.

In the ‘.android‘ directory at the root of your home directory (e.g., “C:\Users\rlathanh\.android\” create a file named ‘adb_usb.ini‘ with the following text (or add the text on a new line):

0x2080

Your NOOK Color should now be recognized by ADB!