Trouble with the Google GDK Sneak Peek

As promised, we have begun experimenting with Glassware.  Unfortunately, Google's instructions for installing the Glass Development Kit (GDK) Sneak Peek are less than complete.

I will spare you the unnecessary regurgitation of Google's GDK installation instructions because they are readily available online.  What I will let you know about is the portion they seemed to have left out for those of us running Windows.

In my case, I used Windows 7 64-bit and my problems began when I went to plug in Glass, the final step in setting up the Glass development environment.  Instead of Glass appearing in the Devices tab of DDMS as promised, I received a Windows installation error, "Windows could not install device driver".

Fortunately, there were trailblazers before me that already solved this issue.  Here are their instructions:

1 - Find your usb driver folder within the adt bundle folder, on my computer it was here:

C:\Users\mscheel\Development\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20130219\sdk\extras\google\usb_driver

2 - Open up the file called android_winusb.inf
Add this magical snippet to both the [Google.NTamd64] and [Google.NTx86] section, which includes the correct PID and VID for Google Glass:

;GoogleGlass%SingleAdbInterface%= USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E11&REV_0216%CompositeAdbInterface%= USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_4E11&MI_01

%SingleAdbInterface%= USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_9001&REV_0216%CompositeAdbInterface%= USB_Install, USB\VID_18D1&PID_9001&MI_01

[Update August 2013 - In windows you can find the values for the above by going into Device Manager, right clicking your device > Properties > Details Tab > Change Dropdown to Hardware Ids. Once you have them make sure they match what you put into your inf file, for a developer I helped recently we had to comment out the top two lines above and just use the last two lines]

NOTE December 2013: I did not have to change the Device IDs as instructed.  After talking with other developers they were also able to just use the IDs in the samples above.

3 - Go into Device Manager and find the yellow warning icon for Glass, right click it and select Update Driver Software, choose select from computer and enter in the path in step #1 (just the parent folder of android_winusb.inf). My computer gave an anti-virus warning that I dismissed, and shortly after I was able to use Droid AT Screen to mirror my Glass display onto my windows PC, which is great for presentations.

Additional details available at my Glass Community post.