On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 13:08 -0500, Peter Johansson wrote:
> With 802.11b USB dongles under $20 and 802.11g dongles under $30,
> combined with the availability of USB on a flash PIC, this would seem
> to be a very useful out-of-the-box wireless communications solution.
> Has anyone made this happen yet?  Has anyone tried?  (Either with the
> older non-flash USB PICs or with one of the FTDI chips)

Both are USB slave devices, they will not be able to talk to each other.
You need a USB host chip to talk to the USB wireless dongle.

> I'm referring here to basic communication -- just the ability to send
> and receive raw ethernet frames.  Implementation of IP (not to mention
> UDP) would be a huge bonus, but that's been done elsewhere with PICs
> on a wire, and shouldn't be too difficult to integrate.
> 
> I realize that there are numerous chipsets and protocols among the USB
> devices and each one would require different driver software.  My
> guess is that protocol information could be divined from the Linux
> kernel sources if not otherwise publicly available.

Unfortunately the IP stack is rarely all that's missing. The reason
these devices are so cheap is because MOST of the work is done in
software, and I'm not even talking about IP stuff. I doubt very much a
PIC, even with a USB host chip, would have enough power to do something
useful. You'd be MUCH more likely to get something working with some
PCMCIA or CF wireless cards. TTYL


-----------------------------
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