On 5/7/08, William Chops Westfield wrote: > > On May 6, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote: > > Ok it can not beat big USB related companies like NXP and Cypress. > > In general, the "USB sticks" being discussed do NOT use the native > USB capabilities of the CPU being "demonstrated"; there's an extra > chip on there that does the USB-to-jtag or USB-to-DebugWire or USB-to- > ICP conversion. Sometimes the USB chip isn't even in the same CPU > family as the "eval" chip, or isn't a CPU. The TI "EZ430-f2013", > which was one of the early examples in this genre, uses one of TI's > stand-alone USB/serial for the USB interface, a large 64-pin CPU for > the control functions, and the device the user gets to play with is > that 14-pin 430f2013... And I think my Luminary thing that's close > actually uses an FTDI USB chip. So the whole "USB stick" format > thing isn't at all dependent on the manufacturer have "good", or even > "any" USB support. Yes this is correct. I have an Infineon U-Light Stick with uses an Silabs CP2101 as the debugger interface. Other Infineon Starter Kits (for 8051 or 80166) also use similar USB to serial converters. > Note that the PIC32 eval board is pretty close to this sort of thing. I do not have the board as I find it too limited. I opted to use PIMs with the Explorer 16 board which I bought two years ago but had not really touched until now. > I find the format a mixed blessing. Too many vendors don't give you > enough access to the chip being evaluated (IIRC, the original silabs > "toolstick" had one LED and was supposed only to demonstrate the SW > tools, for example. They've gotten better since then!) And the > direct-to-USB format makes support on non-windows platforms unlikely; > there's usually too much to reverse engineer. Hmm, I think the TI USB serial bridge is supported under Linux. And I think MSPGCC supports it (spi-by-wire or JTAG) under Linux with a close source binary library. As for Mac OS X, no idea. There are also some efforts on reverse-engineering Silabs's C2/JTAG debug interface. > But they're really cute, too. PICkit 2 is cute as well. With the bootloader, it is actually a better evaluation platform than the other USB sticks. Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist