Java program to display reception of a USB mobile broadband dongle.

[adwodon]

Ok so to introduce myself, I am 3rd year physics student.

I am currently part of a group project to boost mobile broadband reception using an inductively coupled antenna.

One of the things I am interested in finding out is how viable it would be for us to make a program which used AT commands to communicate with the USB dongle to display the reception.

We are familiar with java after taking a module last term, the thing which I am unsure of with this is how we acquire the data from the dongle.

All I need is for someone to point me in the right direction, do I have to look into communication with USB devices? (I read id need an external API for this)
I believe somewhere I saw mentioned that this could be handled by InputStream/OutputStream, is that the case?

The programming aspect of this project is entirely our idea and isnt part of the requirements of the project so currently im just trying to assess whether or not its worth going down this path or if the challenge is too great considering we have other things to focus on.

Any information would be hugely appreciated :D

[Debugger]

Well this may not be much help, but first off it sounds like a very fun project, but from what i have read, i believe you will need an external API for the usb connection, so thats what i would look into

[quad64bit]

Without an actual USB driver, and or a set of APIs for communicating with the dongle, it might be very difficult. I think only the linux version of the JVM has USB access, and I think only with a package that include some native code which you must add separately. (the last I checked anyway). Generally speaking, java does not have hardware access other than perhaps file access, since it runs in a virtual machine. Java might not be the best choice unless someone has already done the work of making APIs available.