FTDIchips?

[Snow_Cat]

I am unfamiliar with ftdichip.comFTDI's products and would like to know more. At a glance they look ideal for applications where I need to add a USB port to something; but then so did the XXR9 where I needed to add an ethernet port to something, and that didn't end well...

What is the programming hardware?

• I²C? JTAG? meow-snow.blogspot.comWires crammed into a USB port?

Example code?

• Are there lisence restrictions? Does it work?

What is the instruction set?

• Is there a free compilier that can compile the example code? Is it consistent between versions? Will code need to be rewritten to suit seemingly arbitary syntax changes in every minor version update?

How good is the technical documention for features like DMA and the peripherial interfaces?

• Are they complete and reliable or will I be screaming some variation of:

  What exactly are 'recessive bits on the peripherial bus'? And why do they need to scramble my packets?

  because of an undocumented encryption feature that is deactivated by a initilization call to a different peripherial not used in my project. Or some other similar omission?

Mostly I want to know if this the sort of thing I could enjoy plaing with.

[timmeh87]

Edit: I later realize that maybe you arent talking about rs232. But Im pretty sure the chips that give you GP/IO ports work in the same way. no programming, you get a driver free from the website, and all the programming is done on the PC side of things.


LOL I was about to flag you as a spambot, what with all the links in your post. Your post in the NES forum convinced me otherwise

Anyways, My understanding of the FTDI USB-to-232 chips is that they work out of the box. No programming. Thats the awesomeness of these all-in-one serial bridge chips. I used the cp2101 from silabs before, it worked pretty good, but the package was more than a female of the dog species to solder (24QFN or something like that).

I have looked to the FTDI chips as an alternative, as they come in easier to solder SOIC packages. I haven't used one before, though I was looking at these ones:

http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/FT232R.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Read the datasheet, it should answer a lot of questions. Page 27 has the schematic for a simple rs232 converter.
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documen ... FT232R.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Snow_Cat]

Meow, back to this question again.

Can anyone reccommend a reliable (and cheap?) USB host microcontroller with an open development license?