No Religion wrote:
> Have you ever looked in depth at how the USB interface and protocol work
> inside?

Yes, I've read the spec.

> I've never seen anything more "complex with no reason" in my
> life.
> There's no technical justifications to all that complexity. Only market,
> it seems..

I don't see much technical justification for your statement.  Only a
deliberate attitude problem it seems..

The main intention behind USB was making it idiot proof for the customer.
This comes at a price of some complexity, particularly in the protocol.  I
think most of it was well designed given that goal.  Like I said before, I
think they dropped the ball on supplying power, but that's not the part your
complaining about anyway.  Aside from your content free rant above, what
exactly do you think is needlessly complex?  It seems to me that every piece
has a purpose.

My biggest gripe is that the USB organization doesn't seem to care about the
little guys.  $1,500 is nothing for a large company, but despite what Andrew
Warren said (who works for a large company that produces USB chips), $1,500
can be a real issue for a little company.  The vendor IDs should be much
cheaper, since these obviously don't cost much more than a little
bookeeping.  If they want to provide plugfests, make those pay their own way
by charging what it takes to produce them.  Or, at least have a sliding
scale for vendor IDs based on company size or number of units shipped.  If I
remember right, some other standards (ethernet?) base the fee in part on
company size.  Or why not have the USB organization sell individual device
IDs within a general purpose vendor ID for $50 or something, just enough to
cover the registration costs.  Little guys could be accomodated if there was
only the will to do so, but this is not in the interest of the big guys that
are the influential "members" of the USB organization.  Besides, they all
got there with the existing rules, so why would they want to let others in
more cheaply?

The other dissappointment has been the lack of a really accessable USB
microcontroller for quick one-off or low volume projects.  I looked at the
Cypress line a year or two ago, and there wasn't the combination of what I
really wanted, in addition to the whole company presenting a strong attitude
against small volume designs.  In one case the chip looked reasonable, but
it was OTP only with no flash or UV erasable parts.  The only way to do
software development was to buy a case of parts and use a new one each
retry.  Duh!

Microchip's offering is on an outdated PIC and can only do low speed.
Pretty useless.  Fortunately this should all be fixed with the introduction
of the full speed USB 18F parts.  That took way too long.


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