USB to send ASCII characters to PC

[towlerg]

Perhaps you could use one of the three 1 bit outputs NumLock, CapsLock and ScrollLock to implement flow control for your hardware.

[Ioannis]

George,
I do not understand where flow control is needed.

Ioannis

[towlerg]

As you will be creating another keyboard, any output will be sent to what ever window has focus.

[Ioannis]

Yes, the focus is a thing that bothers me and I wish I knew a way to deal with it.

If for any reason (and windows has a lot, I am sure) the focus is lost, data entry is lost too...

[towlerg]

Are you writing a windows app? If so you can use those control lines to allow your hardware to tx. BTW hope I'm not teaching you to suck eggs but although you might assume that pressing CapsLock etc. turn on the LED on the keyboard, in fact all it does is set a modifier bit and the keyboard driver sends a signal to operate the LED.

[Ioannis]

Unfortunately I am not qualified to write PC apps... Too pity that once I started to do things in C (command line environment) and a little Visual Basic 6 but did not evolve on that.

Thanks anyway,
Ioannis

[mpgmike]

I started working with PC apps about 5 years ago. I bought Visual Studio 2015 Professional and 5 books on the subject. Although VS 2019 is out, the books probably update with the versioning. One I recommend to get you functional (at a cheap price) is:

Visual Basic in easy steps
www.ineasysteps.com
My 4th (2015) Edition has ISBN: 978-1-84078-701-6
I bought it on Amazon. It's only 192 pages and covers only the essentials. It was the cheapest and thinest of the 5 books I bought, yet covers topics like data bases that the thicker more expensive books gloss over.

As for connecting the PC to a PIC via USB, I have been using HIDmaker; although I have also been able to get Microchip's MLA (in C for MPLABX) templates to work as well.

[towlerg]

@Ioannis What would you want an app to do with the data? If some kind code elf were to create an app for you it would make more sense to us Vendor (otherwise known as Custom) which is a variation of HID but needs an app to talk to.