As a followup to the recent discussion on connecting a PIC to an
Ethernet Bus, I would like to ask if anyone has some Information on
connecting a PIC to the USB.
USB should have some serious advantages over the RS232 Serial Bus and
even RS485.
You could hook many PICs to the same Bus, so for example with an USB
based PIC-Programmer you would never have to unplug it because you are
short of serial ports.
The data transmission speed should be high enoug for a lot of things you
cannot achieve today (eg. hooking a black and white ccd camera to your
pc, build a cheap logic state recorder, sampling high speed data like
audio sounds)
Most people will have USB for free sooner or later as it is build into
any Motherboard sold today anyway. (That makes a huge market for
professional projects)
You would not run out of PC interrupt lines, as you do, if you put RS232
cards into Your PC.
I guess the hardest thing is, that on the Computer side there are no
software equivalents to terminal programs which let you access the USB
in an easy way?
The obvious disadvantage to ethernet would be, that your hardware still
cannot be accessed directly from any PC in a network.
Ralf