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Re: Microcontrollers USB-Stick
by Xiaofan Chen
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On 5/7/08, William Chops Westfield <westfw@...> 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
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>
> 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
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