Tag: beurer

Beurer GL50, Linux and Debug Interfaces

In the previous post when I reviewed the Beurer GL50, I have said that on Windows this appears as a CD-Rom with the installer and portable software to use to download the data off it. This is actually quite handy for the users, but of course leaves behind users of Linux and macOS — except of course if you wanted to use the Bluetooth interface.

I did note that on Linux, the whole device does not work correctly. Indeed, when you connect this to a modern Linux kernel, it’ll fail to mount at all. But because of the way udev senses a new CD-Rom being inserted, it also causes an infinite loop in the userspace, making udev use most of a single core for hours and hours, trying to process CD in, CD out events.

When I noticed it I thought it would be a problem in the USB Mass Storage implementation, but at the end of the day the problem turned out to be one layer below that and be a problem in the SCSI command implementation instead. Because yes, of course USB Mass Storage virtual CD-Rom devices still mostly point at SCSI implementations below.

To provide enough context, and to remind myself how I went around this if I ever forget, the Beurer device appears to use a virtual CD-Rom interface on a chip developed by either Cygnal or Silicon Labs (the latter bought the former in 2003). I only know the Product ID of the device as 0x85ED, but I failed trying to track down the SiliconLabs model to figure out why and how.

To find may way around the Linux kernel, and try to get the device to connect at all, I ended up taking a page off marcan’s book, and used the qemu’s ability to launch a Linux kernel directly, with a minimum initramfs that only contains the minimum amount of files. In my case, I used the busybox-static binary that came with OpenSuse as the base, since I didn’t need any particular reproduction case beside trying to mount the device.

The next problem was figuring out how to get the right debug information. At first I needed to inspect at least four separate parts of the kernel: USB Mass Storage, the Uniform (sic) CD-Rom driver, the SCSI layer, and the ISO9660 filesystem support — none of those seemed a clear culprit at the very beginning, so debugging time it was. Each of those appear to have separate ideas of how to do debugging at all, at least up to version 5.3 which is the one I’ve been hacking on.

The USB Mass Storage layer has its own configuration option (CONFIG_USB_STORAGE_DEBUG), and once enabled in the kernel config, a ton of information on the USB Mass Storage is output on the kernel console. SCSI comes with its own logging support (CONFIG_SCSI_LOGGING) but as I found a few days of hacking later, you also need to enable it within /proc/sys/dev/scsi/logging_level, and to do so you need to calculate an annoying bitmask — thankfully there’s a tool in sg3_utils called scsi_logging_level… but it says a lot that it’s needed, in my opinion. The block layer in turn has its own CONFIG_BLK_DEBUG_FS option, but I didn’t even manage to look at how that’s configured.

The SCSI CD driver (sr), has a few debug outputs that need to be enabled by removing manual #if conditions in the code, while the cdrom driver comes with its own log level configuration, a module parameter to enable the logging, and overall a complicated set of debug knobs. And just enabling them is not useful — at some point the debug output in the cdrom driver was migrated to the modern dynamic debug support, which means you need to enable the debugging specifically for the driver, and then you need to enable the dynamic debug. I sent a patch to just remove the driver-specific knobs.

Funnily enough, when I sent the first version of the patch, I was told about the ftrace interface, which turned out to be perfect to continue sorting out the calls that I needed to tweak. This turned into another patch, that removes all the debug output that is redundant with ftrace.

So after all of this, what was the problem? Well, there’s a patch for that, too. The chip used by this meter does not actually include all the MMC commands, or all of the audio CD command. Some of those missing features are okay, and an error returned from the device will be properly ignored. Others cause further SCSI commands to fail, and that’s why I ended up having to implement vendor-specific support to mask away quite a few features — and gate usage in a few functions. It appears to me that as CD-Rom, CD-RW, and DVDs became more standard, the driver stopped properly gating feature usage.

Well, I don’t have more details of what I did to share, beside what is already in the patches. But I think if there’s a lesson here, is that if you want to sink your teeth into the Linux kernel’s code, you can definitely take a peek at a random old driver, and figure out if it was over-engineered in a past that did not come with nice trimmings such as ftrace, or dynamic debug support, or generally the idea that the kernel is one big common project.

Glucometer Review: beurer GL50 evo

I was looking for a new puzzle to solve after I finally finished with the GlucoRx Nexus (aka TaiDoc TD-4277), so I decided to check out what Boots, being one of the biggest pharmacy in the country, would show on their website under “glucometer”. The answer was the Beurer GL-50, which surprised me because I didn’t know Beurer did glucometers at all. It also was extremely overpriced at £55. But thankfully I found it for £20 at Argos/eBay, so I decided to give it a try.

The reason why I was happy to get one was that the the device itself looked interesting, and reminded me of the Accu-Chek Mobile, with its all-in-one design. While the website calls it a 3-in-1, there are only two components to the device: the meter itself and the lancing device. The “third” device is the USB connector that appears when you disconnect the other two. I have to say that this is a very interesting approach, as it makes it much easier to connect to a computer — if it wasn’t that the size of the meter makes it very hard to connect it.

On my laptop, I can only use it on the USB plug on the right, because on the left, it would cover the USB-C plug I use to charge it. It’s also fairly tall, which makes it hard to use on chargers such as my trusted Anker 5-port USB-C (of which I have five, spread across rooms.) At the end, I had to remove two cables from one of them to be able to charge the meter, which is required for it to be usable at all, when it arrives.

To be honest, I’m not sure if the battery being discharged was normal or due to the fact that the device appears to have been left on shelves for a while: the five sample strips to test the device expire in less than two months. I guess it’s not the kind of device that flies off the shelves.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo, GlucoRx Nexus

So how does the device fare compared to other meters? Size wise, it’s much nicer to handle than the GlucoRx, although it looks bigger than the FreeStyle Libre reader. Part of the reason is that the device, in its default configuration, includes the lancing device, unlike both of the meters I’m comparing it with above. If you don’t plan to use the included lancing device, for instance because you have a favourite lancing device like me (I’m partial to the OneTouch Delica), you can remove the lancing device and hide the USB plug with the alternative provider cap. The meter then takes a much smaller profile than the Libre too. I actually like the compact size better than the spread out one of the FreeStyle Precision Neo.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo (without lancing device), GlucoRx Nexus

Interface-wise, the gl50 is confusingly different from anything I have seen before. It comes with a flush on/off switch on the side, which would be frustrating for most people with short nails, or for people with impeded motion control. Practically, I think this and the “Nexus” are at opposite ends of the scale — the TD-4277 has big, blocky display that can be read without glasses and a single, big button, which makes it a perfect meter for the elderly. The gl50 is frustrating even for me in my thirties.

The flush switch is not the only problem. After you turn it on, the control you have is a wheel, which can be clicked. So you navigate menus in up-down-click. Not very obvious but feasible. But since the wheel can easily be pressed in your purse, that’s why you got the flush switch, I guess. The UI is pretty much barebone but it includes the settings for enabling Bluetooth (with a matching Android app, which I have not checked out for this review yet), and NFC (not sure what for). Worthy of note is that the UI defaults to German, without asking you, and you need to manage to get to the settings in that language to switch to English, Italian, French, or Spanish.

Once you plug it into a computer with Windows, the device appears as a standard CD-Rom UMS device that includes an auto-started “portable” version of the download software, which is a very nice addition, again reminiscent of the Accu-Chek Mobile. It also comes with an installer for the onboard software. As a preview of the technical information post on this meter, it looks like that, similar to the OneTouch Verio, the readings are downloaded through UMS/SCSI packets.

I called out Windows above because I have not checked how this even presents on macOS, and on Linux… it doesn’t. It looks like I may have to take some time to debug the kernel, because what I get on Linux is infinite dmesg spam. I fear the UMS implementation on the meter is missing something, and Linux sends a command that the meter does not recognize.

The software itself is pretty much bland, and there’s nothing really much to say. It does not appear to have a way to even set or get the time for the device, which in my case is still stuck in 2015, because I couldn’t bother yet to roll the wheel all the way to today.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this meter over any of the other meters I have or used. If beurer keeps staying in the market of glucometers (assuming they are making it themselves, rather than rebranding someone else’s, like GlucoRx and Menarini appear to do), then it might be an interesting start of further competition in Europe, which I would actually appreciate.