Jens,
There's a plethora of small USB-I/O interface PCBs out there (if you're
willing to deal with the sometimes substantial quirks of its designers) or
you could simply roll your own. If you can spend the money on a PCB and the
time to design and assemble it than you should check out the USB peripherals
from Cypress Semiconductor, Texas Instruments and a few others. They're very
easy to setup and work like a charm, requiring very little hand-holding even
out to 480Mps transfer rates. You will usually have to add your A/D
converters unless you get yourself I believe an Analog Devices MCU that has
some ADC/DACs on chip and connect it either to a USB peripheral, with up to
40 digital I/O pins, or a USB slave FIFO.
I've you're not into soldering under a microscope then just buy an
inexpensive card and upload your own firmware to the mostly Intel x51/52
cores to get your own functionality. Under OS X you don't need a driver for
your vendor specific device as you will know, so as long as you have the
board and know what USB chip you're dealing with then you're all set. Just
beware that many of these boards contain chips that are several years old so
you're almost always better off rolling your own with the latest silicon.
Best Regards,
Vincenzo Kreft-Kerekes
Neurobiology / Duke University
-----Original Message-----
From: email@hidden [mailto:email@hidden]On
Behalf Of Jens Bauer
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 8:22 AM
To: USB-Development
Subject: [OT] Hardware resources
Hi,
I know it might be a bit off-topic, as I'd expect this list to be
programming only.
I'd like to make a USB-joystick, but also a "USB Nerd Port", which
means:
A connection via the USB-interface, which handles multiple digital and
analogue inputs and outputs.
For example...
A USB - to - 9-pin "joystick" port, which I can read pin 1 as up, 2 as
down, 3 as left, 4 as right, 5 as pot A, 6 as fire, 9 as pot B. pin 7
should be 5V DC and pin8 should be GND.
I'd like to be able to read the 'analog' value of pin 1-4 and 6, so I
get a value between 0 and 255.
Furthermore, I'd like it to be possible to 'set' the voltage on pin 1-4
and 6 to a value between (n * 5V / 255).
-So in fact, I'm looking for an easy way to read analog and digital
values using USB, as we don't have things like a gameport on the Mac.
I've heard that there are ready-made serial USB chips availablee, but I
don't know anything else about it.
What I'm really up to, is to make a port, where "everything is
allowed"; short-circuiting pins and connecting LEDs to pins directly,
just like the Atari 130XE and 800XL could be set to control gadgets via
the joystick ports.
I hope this explains my plans well enough. ;)
Any help will be greatly appreciated! =)
Love,
Jens
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