I wanted to access my Acer A500 via ADB (Android Debug Bridge). When I connected it I was able to access it as a USB Mass Storage device, but ADB didn’t see it as a device. I found a page describing how to install the USB ADB drivers, but Windows said the drivers were not valid for my hardware.
I looked in the android_winusb.inf file and it lists a number of individual supported devices, but the Acer A500 wasn’t there. One of the reasons I picked the A500 was that it runs straight up Android, and not a modified version. So in theory the stock driver should work fine (yes, it is a hardware driver, but I figured what the heck.) It is possible that Acer has a download for this too, but 3rd parties tend to bundle extra junk, so I thought I would try the stock driver.
In theory this should work just as well for other Android devices. Proceed at your own risk.
1. So I went into Device Manager and found the tablet under Unknown Devices:
2. To get the Hardware ID’s for right click and select Properties, Details tab, then select Hardware Ids from the Property drop down:
3. In the android_winusb.inf file I added the following in the [Google.NTamd64] section.
; ACER Iconia Tab A500 %SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0502&PID_3325 %CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0502&PID_3325&MI_01
The line with the semicolon prefix is a comment. You will see that the other lines match with these. The ID’s come from the Hardware Ids in device manager (compare to screen shot.) If you are trying a different tablet then yours may be different.
4. Tell Windows to Update Driver (driver tab) then browse to that folder. My folder was “C:\Dev\android-sdk-windows\extras\google\usb_driver\” but if you installed the SDK in a different path then yours may be different. It will warn you that it can’t verify the publisher of the driver. I clicked “Install Anyway”.
Now Device Manager shows it as an Android Composite ADB Interface under Android Devices, and it shows that a driver is loaded.
I could further edit the inf file to change the name that is displayed, but now it works with ADB for deploying and debugging my Android projects.
Update: Acer does have a USB driver for download, but it doesn’t provide an ADB driver.