Philip Pemberton wrote:
> A bit of both, actually. I'm hacking together a homebrew 'mood light'
> out of a couple of RGB LEDs, and I thought it would be a decent project
> to get back into the 'swing of things' - it's been a good few months
> since I've written any code for LibUSB, or the Microchip USB framework,
> and I wanted to do something simple first.

If your interested in the code I described, I can make it available in its
present form.  Like I said, it's free for personal projects, and I think
you'll find the source a lot better documented than Microchip's.

> Of course, it's not simple
> when you've got three LEDs and only two PWM channels.

Sure it is.  No need to use hardware PWM just to adjust the brightness of
LEDs for human display.  A USB PIC can run at 12MHz instruction rate.  Let's
say you set up a periodic 100 cycle interrupt to update all the PWM outputs,
then you can have 8 bit brightness resolution at 471Hz update rate for as
many channels as you have output pins.  471Hz is fast enough for your eyes
to percieve average brightness, and a PWM update interrupt should only take
a small part of the 100 cycles leaving most of the processor to other tasks.

> The other project is a low-volume device that reads floppy discs at the
> flux transition level. It's basically meant to allow 'odd format' discs
> to be read, analysed and (where required) copied. There are a lot of
> 'vintage' computers out there and not a lot of copies of install discs
> and the like. Problem being that PC floppy controllers can't generally
> copy these discs. So the obvious solution is a box that can read and
> write discs at the lowest level possible. This is the 'big thing' that
> I REALLY don't want to screw up. The HDL code is all done, I just need
> to build up a prototype, write the software and squash the inevitable
> bugs.

If this is a commercial project then maybe we can help.  I have experience
with PICs communicating over the floppy bus.


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