Getting Started with my OUYA

So now I have my OUYA Dev kit all unboxed and hooked up to the TV and everything. The screens and welcome video look nice, but to load anything on it I needed to get it hooked up to the computer and detected as a valid Android device.

I like to do my development in Eclipse on Windows. I know, I'm crazy. I like my Mac and all, but when I write software (except for iOS of course) I've always been in a Microsoft environment. Maybe it's because my first introduction to programming was BASIC in DOS. Maybe? But from BASIC to Turbo Pascal to C to Java, I've always used a DOS or Windows PC. I'm now on Windows 7 64-bit and of course the OUYA wasn't detected as a valid device when I plugged it in.

The Windows section of the setup information for OUYA devs is a little sparse right now (ok, it's empty) but the forums did provide me with a solution, which I will now share. Hopefully they'll provide some kind of driver with the OUYA when it is released to the general public in a few months, but if not this trick will probably still work.

First, find the Android device driver file provided by Google in your Android SDK. Mine was

C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\extras\google\android_winusb.inf

and yours is probably somewhere similar. Open that file up in Nodepad and add these two lines in the [Google.NTx86] section:


%SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0955&PID_7100&MI_01
%CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0955&PID_7100&REV_0232&MI_01


Then you go to your Device Manager and find the unknown device. It is probably calling itself "Cardhu" or something. I don't know what that's about, but just open that up and click the "Update Driver" button. Choose "Browse my computer for driver software" and then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer". On the next screen, click on the "Have Disk" button and then browse for the .INF file you edited earlier. Then when asked to pick a model, select "Android ADB Interface". You'll probably get warnings about the driver not being signed. Tell the Windows nanny to take a hike and install the driver anyway.

That's what worked for me.