Have a look at http://www.beyondlogic.org They have very good sections on interfacing to a PC using USB.
I have used several USB ICs from Philips, and all are simple to use.
Points to consider 1) If you only want to support the slow USB 1.1 devices (1.5Mbps) then look at USB enabled Microchip PICs 2) Must of the ICs available are in packages that need to be surface mounted. Try buying a development board or evaluation kit, unless you are really good with a soldering iron. 3) USB devices have the idea of a class. e.g. if your project supports the "serial" class then you can use the USB serial driver in linux. If you need more flexibility you will have to write a new driver to support yor custom device class. The USB linux drivers are fairly mature and there is documentation on writing new USB device drivers. 4) There are four different USB transfer types. Control (mandatory) / Interrupt / Bulk / Isochronous (regular transfer with reserved bandwidth) Ensure the ICs you look at support the transfer types you need and have enough endpoints (channels) for your needs.
I study at the University of Southampton, UK, taking a Computer Engineering degree
For a Real Time Computing course we are using PK-threads, a tiny (28kB) kernel that supports standard POSIX multithreading. It is also available as an OS called roadrunner. It is simple enough to fully understand, but still has enough complexity e.g. install IRQ handlers, dealing with threads running in user and kernel space, memory protection.
Other projects in the past have included:- * FAT12 disk reader in linux * Add to a small compiler to add more language constructs * Simple news server * OpenGL
I think that linux would be too hard to study, although it is the perfect development system. We get a set of CD's each year with a copy of RedHat.
The suggestion in some posts that students should be set to work on Open Source projects is stupid. Students do these projects to learn about the mistakes they might make in programming!! I am sure we would all rather have people who want to write a program, improve and support it
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Have a look at http://www.beyondlogic.org
They have very good sections on interfacing to a PC using USB.
I have used several USB ICs from Philips, and all are simple to use.
Points to consider
1) If you only want to support the slow USB 1.1 devices (1.5Mbps) then look at USB enabled Microchip PICs
2) Must of the ICs available are in packages that need to be surface mounted. Try buying a development board or evaluation kit, unless you are really good with a soldering iron.
3) USB devices have the idea of a class. e.g. if your project supports the "serial" class then you can use the USB serial driver in linux.
If you need more flexibility you will have to write a new driver to support yor custom device class.
The USB linux drivers are fairly mature and there is documentation on writing new USB device drivers.
4) There are four different USB transfer types.
Control (mandatory) / Interrupt / Bulk / Isochronous (regular transfer with reserved bandwidth)
Ensure the ICs you look at support the transfer types you need and have enough endpoints (channels) for your needs.
I study at the University of Southampton, UK, taking a Computer Engineering degree
For a Real Time Computing course we are using PK-threads, a tiny (28kB) kernel that supports standard POSIX multithreading.
It is also available as an OS called roadrunner.
It is simple enough to fully understand, but still has enough complexity
e.g. install IRQ handlers, dealing with threads running in user and kernel space, memory protection.
Other projects in the past have included:-
* FAT12 disk reader in linux
* Add to a small compiler to add more language constructs
* Simple news server
* OpenGL
I think that linux would be too hard to study, although it is the perfect development system. We get a set of CD's each year with a copy of RedHat.
The suggestion in some posts that students should be set to work on Open Source projects is stupid. Students do these projects to learn about the mistakes they might make in programming!! I am sure we would all rather have people who want to write a program, improve and support it