USB and PIC's
Thursday 19 July 2007 at 12:46 pm
So while doing some quick research into building my own USB devices on the cheap (Hobby), I've noticed something. There isn't really a cheap and quick way to-do this. No wonder most hobbiest stick to Serial or Parallel, these don't require extra money or extra knowledge to use. Now when ya thing about it, USB was designed to replace these technologies right? So why didn't they think about it when they started. why make it so hard to actually just knock something up and plug it in and just have direct access to it, Take the parallel port, no fancy drivers required just a case of accessing the correct memory location to send/receive over basically whatever pin on the port you wanted. Simple and it worked.
But needless to say i haven't given up, Instead of trying to design something that i can just reuse and rebuild in everything i make from this point onwards. I've decided maybe it'd be better to design some sort of separate interface. That you can just plug your boards into. Now there's probably like a million of these out there i haven't really looked into it as yet. I may even borrow ideas from other people. But I'm thinking I still have old Serial/Parallel stuff about, and I'd kinda like to be able to use them without having to really re-invent the wheel. So why not a USB Interface that can also handle Serial/Parallel as well as having room for anything new i work on in the future. From a driver stand point this might be a nightmare and beyond me, Cos if you've ever tried to make drivers for Windows then you'll know that there isn't really a lot of good reading information out there about it. And most of the communities on-line are just a tad on the unfriendly side to new people.
The electronics sites I've encountered so far are quite the same I've noticed too, or they just look so bad on the screen that you never stay very long anyway. I'm sure I'll find somewhere that i seem to enjoy within all this eventually though i always do.
As far as the game's programming, Still havnt really produced anything of note just messed about with XNA. Its the language you see C# is nice but its so close to Object Pascal that i find myself writing in pascal then have to debug forever. Guess its just something i have to get used to. I know Microsoft are supposed to be releasing XNA 2.0 Soon, and the additions look very good indeed (Funny side note, i didnt find this information on a XNA website, i actually found it on the Pascal Website). Im just hoping they finally release a x64 compiler that you dont have to fight with Visual Studio Express to use.
I’d probably just use a serial or parallel to USB adapter cable tbh.
Shadee (Email ) - 20-07-’07 12:36If I’d want the device to look nice I’d just make sure to have enough room in the casing for the parallel/serial connector and that way all you see coming out of it is the cable and USB connector.
That’s just the hardware part of it though, the drivers would still be a pain.