Category Archives: USB

More MAX3421E USB peripheral/host controller shields

Circuits@Home has two Arduino USB Peripheral/Host Controller shields with the MAX3421E we covered earlier. A driver is available for the Arduino, which should be portable to other microcontrollers. There are also libraries for working with USB devices, such as cameras, bluetooth devices, and simple Human Interface Devices like mice and keyboards.

Keyglove Arduino/AVR-powered keyboard substitute

Here’s a keyboard-glove prototype in development by Jeff Rowberg. The Keyglove is a glove-based USB input device that provides full keyboard control, designed for wearable and mobile computing and to assist the disabled. According to Jeff: The Keyglove is a portable Arduino/AVR-powered glove that uses touch combinations (for keys) and an accelerometer (for the mouse) […]

Shmoocon 2011: Linux autorun USB attacks

Many of us use Linux on a regular basis, and some users mistakenly believe that it’s immune to many of the hack attacks commonly used against Windows machines. In this talk presented at the Shmoocon 2011 conference which recently concluded in Washington, DC, Jon Larimer demonstrates how the development of common windows features in Linux, […]

Secure usb time stamp

Simon Inns created a secure USB time stamp device. This project implements a USB device which provides a real-time clock for the purpose of time-stamping events in an non-networked embedded computer environment. For embedded applications where a periodic time-stamp is required (such as entry-system logs, configuration audit logs, etc.) it is necessary to have a […]

Portable Hackintosh on a USB thumb drive

People put linux on their flash drives all the time. They also get hackintosh on their hard drives quite often. However, it’d be nice to be able to get the same live experience we get with Linux using OS X. With a distribution of OS X 10.6.2 called iPortable Snow, we can. Will Fancher at […]

HACK: Open source USB stack on MCP2200

Microchip has a new USB->serial converter chip called the MCP2200. We suspected they made this chip from a 20-pin PIC. The MCP2200 pinout is like other PIC uCs, and it has similar reset pin and internal voltage regulator circuits. We hooked up our trusty PICKIT3 and read the device ID. The MCP2200 was recognized as a […]

NEW PRODUCT: MCP2200 USB to Serial breakout board

The MCP2200 is a new USB to serial converter chip from Microchip. Our MCP2200 breakout board brings all the pins to bread board friendly headers. USB CDC virtual serial port interface Secondary HID configuration interface Up to 8 additional IO 256bytes user EEPROM TX/RX indicator LEDs All pins to bread-board friendly header Open source (CC-0) […]

Announcement: Open source PIC USB stack

Forum member Honken released an open source USB firmware for PIC microcontrollers. This is a major open source contribution, congratulations! Most PIC 18F2550 and 18F4550 USB projects you see on the web use the Microchip USB source code. It’s easy to use and free. There’s one big problem: Microchip uses a license that isn’t open […]

Virtual USB analyzer

The Virtual USB Analyzer is a well documented free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. It provides a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis. The Analyzer is NOT a hardware USB analyzer or USB sniffer: it is an interface […]

Broken laptop recovered using Arduino

When Jack the Vendicator’s laptop display malfunctioned, he thought all was lost. He developed a rescue strategy using an Arduino as a USB bridge between the laptop and a desktop PC. He plugged the Arduino into the laptop, and connected a USB serial converter from his desktop computer to the Arduino’s serial pins. In effect […]

Versaloon programmer

Versaloon is a full-opensource platform for multiple applications, including a programmer, debugger, logic tester, logic analyzer and simple oscilloscope. It’s based on generic USB_TO_XXX protocol, which can support more than 10 kinds of interfaces including JTAG, SWD, SPI, IIC and so on. USB_TO_XXX is not only used to control these interfaces, but also it can […]

V-USB: virtual USB port for Avr microcontrollers

V-USB is a software-only implementation of a low-speed USB device for Atmel’s AVR® microcontrollers, making it possible to build USB hardware with almost any AVR® microcontroller, not requiring any additional chip. V-USB can be licensed freely under the GNU General Public License or alternatively under a commercial license. An example of the hardware needed to […]