Amicus shields

[rmteo]

Impressive. I wonder how they handle USB on the PC end.

Not sure what you mean. PC side?

[dhouston]

Not sure what you mean. PC side?

Do they provide virtual serial port drivers for Windows, Linux, OSX or must users write their own routines to handle USB?

[rmteo]

The STM32 includes a dedicated USB peripheral which can be configured to act as a generic USB slave device with transfer rates up to 12Mbps. It is configured for two uses: first, to receive sketch/program uploads from the IDE and secondly, to emulate a regular serial port for use as a terminal (text read/write). For more info, see http://leaflabs.com/docs/usb.html and http://leaflabs.com/docs/lang/api/se...lang-serialusb

[dhouston]

Good luck with that.

[dhouston]

For my own use, in keeping with the philosophy of phrugality behind the XINO Basic board, I'd like to use a 16F88 with internal 8MHz OSC and with the two comparators used as inverters for the serial lines. There are, at least, three possible bootloaders - TinyPIC Bootloader, Spark Fun's BLoader & ds30. The latter is probably required for those using the bigger PIC but I think the others use less space on the 16F88.

However, I still need a power supply. So it might be better to use an external USB-Serial adapter which can also supply power. This frees the comparators for other uses and saves the cost of an external power supply. An external 5V power supply actually costs less than the USB-Serial adapter but the adapter has the advantage that there are virtual serial port drivers for Windows, Linux & OSX. Plus, using the comparators requires revising the bootloader code which may be above my paygrade. I'll have to wait until I have the XINO kit and USB-Serial adapter in hand to see how best to interface them. While waiting for them (as well as the release of the long-promised Tibbo EM500/GA1000 firmware), I'll do a shield layout for ConnectOne ethernet modules.

The people who make the XINO also have a prototyping shield called ProtoX which you can see on this page (scroll down). This should be compatible with Arduino and clones like Amicus18.

[dhouston]

However, I still need a power supply. So it might be better to use an external USB-Serial adapter which can also supply power.

The people who make XINO are promising a plug-in USB-Serial adapter.

5 way serial header now brings out MCUPWR rail and RESET. This is for our forthcoming serial programmer which will program PICAXE, PIC, Atmel and XRF boards. You can use a generic FTDI board, max232 boards with plain old serial and even those bargain basement CA-42 phone cables which use the prolific chipset. For auto reset you need DTR or you can, like in the old design manually press reset to invoke the bootloader. (Not applicable for PICAXE/Genie as they use a different method, which is fully supported via the stereo jack).

One can only hope that they are faster than Tibbo who still haven't released their long-promised Tibbo EM500/GA1000 firmware.

@Moderators: Please fix the EDIT function.

[ScaleRobotics]

@Moderators: Please fix the EDIT function.

I will write Lester an email, in case he hasn't seen the requests. I am sure he will get to it when he has time. Moderators don't have permissions to look at the settings for the forum, and much less change them. So it is left solely up to the administrator.