Re: Bitbashed Low Speed USB

Chris wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> ...
> Doing some googling last night I came across this mailing list where a couple 
> of months ago there was interest in further developing this project and some 
> evidence that yes it does in fact function as specified.
> 
> Is it as easy to get working as specified? How far have people got in their 
> efforts to further this project?
> 
> There was a call for interest for someone to develop a Linux and/or a Windows 
> device driver in order to be able to utilise such a "beast".

If I understood one person on the avr-gcc list, they said that there is a 
FreeBSD driver for the FTDI chip sets, in addition to the Windows drivers.

Here's the quote from that posting:

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

The chip I use for usb is the all famous FT245BM. It is supported under M$
(free drivers available) and - surprise - also for FreeBSD (I am not that
familiar with it but version 4.7 should have support).
However you must apply a vendor and product id (I obtained them by courtesy
of FTDI). The vendor id is FTDIs and the product id is different from the
standard product id of the original device. This means it will live happily
next to the existing standard device.

The maintainer of the GNU/Linux USB stack advised me to use the libusb package
for now because maintaining a driver is rather difficult (it worked after some
patches but I encountered another completely different problem). When all goes
well then product id will be put into the kernel driver so you can access it
through standard system calls. The userland application will be modified as
such.

The freeice project (i.e. gdb_serialzer) can be extended with other communication
interfaces (ethernet, rs232) and / or other functionalities (programmer, support
more targets, etc) - the sky is the limit - so I believe it will make itself
definitely valuable.


Armand
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Maybe this might be of interest, rather than "rolling-yer-own".

Dale Seaburg
KG5LT