You will likely need a third party control to read from the USB port. I know very little of the standard protocols for data transfer for USB, but I think it appears to resemble IDE. There is hardware available such as "USB Protocol Analysers ". This lends me to believe that the stream may be highly proprietary unlike serial data which can at least be read byte by byte and interpreted. Unless the company that designed your hardware supports an API, you may be in for a very technical ride. Perhaps you may wish to look into a USB to serial converter. If so, then we have some options available to us. If not...?