How to make Proteus act as a real USB device and interact with real hardware?

Question

I am trying to create a keyboard without the physical ICs and other components (I have some components, but not all) as a training exercise to practice HID among other things.

I was wondering if there is a way to use Proteus as a virtual USB device connected to a physical machine (the hosting computer or another computer in the network or linked with a host computer via a male-to-male USB cable).

Can that be done? If so, what do I need other than Proteus and how do I make that happen?

My operating system is Windows 11.

Answer 1

Can that be done?

No. Your laptop's USB controller will not allow to be re-used as something completely different, a USB device.

Also, you'd need the actual USB replying to happen in firmware or at most operating system code, anything else is far too slow – and Proteus is anything but a low-latency in-system emulator, so you're as far from a possible solution as can be.

If you want to do such things, you can use one of the many ARM dev boards with an SoC that comes from a smartphone, automotive infotainment or set-top box heritage, as these do, hardware-wise, support being a USB device instead of a USB host. A popular example of such a device is the raspberry pi series of single-board computers.

You'd then want to develop on the Linux that ships with these devices – you get direct access through the kernel's USB widget infrastructure, to develop your own stuff.

Proteus is still out. You don't need an analog circuit simulator to simulate a digital bus that's basically binary for all practical aspects, running at 12 MHz.