Your Electronics Open Source

LCD2USB is a open source/open hardware project. The goal of LCD2USB is to connect HD44780 based text LCD displays to various PCs via USB. LCD2USB was meant to be cheap and to be made of easily available parts. It is therefore based on the Atmel AVR Mega8 CPU and does not require any difficult to obtain parts like separate USB controllers and the like. The total cost (without display and pcb) are about 5 to 10 Euros. LCD2USB currently comes with a simple demo application that works under Linux, MacOS X and Windows.

LEDLoad is a device and software designed to display many shades of colors from green to red on your computer case LED. Colors are controlled completely by software and can be updated in real-time. The LEDLoad circuit board is connected to one of the internal USB ports found on most newer motherboards. The only actual case modification required is in replacing the two (or more) front panel LEDs with tri-color versions. These are then connected to the LEDLoad circuit board.

The USB lcd panel project is a usb interface to a panel lcd. In order to interface the LCD panel to the PC via the USB, the DevaSys USBI2C I/O development board was used. This board provided us enough I/O pins to connect all of the LCD pins, and use the 8-bit parallel interface. An API was provided by DevaSys in order to communicate with the USBI2C I/O development board. This was utilized in order to communicate with the USB development baord, and ultimately to the LCD panel.

The beyond logic website project inspired my project and how easy it can be to add a usb port to any microcontroller. The beyond logic site has much information about FTDI chips a good start for interfacing USB to serial, fifo, and more.

The USB-Project/Measurement Frontend by R.J. Maris This project esplains how to use a MSP430 controller with USB functionality. Initailly, it seems somewhat curious to have an USB application with an ultralow power device. The MSP430 application can be used as a battery powered datalogger, while data can be transferred from and to a PC via USB. The USB-bus can charge batteries without extra power sources. Of course, the USB-core must not consume any current when the unit is operating on its own. It is exactly this goal which is realized with this project.

The SIXCA website has some free example projects. The following example project demonstrates how to control some devices via USB interface. The PC software program with delphi. The hardware and the software allow the user to control a stepper motor using a PIC18F4550. The sixca website also has other projects such as a USB Daq interface and others.

Features Include :
- CPU PIC18F4550 with full speed USB interface at 48MHz.
- USB 2.0 compliance
- Use on-chip USB driver
- Control 1 stepper motor.
- MPLAB C18 for firmware at USB devices side.
- Delphi 6 for PC Host software




USB ADC board from Standford University. Subsystem of PoGOLite, Polarized Gamma-ray Observer system.

In summary this project involved building a USB device using the PIC 16C745 microprocessor from Microchip. The USB device consisted of a microphone, the microprocessor and other hardware and the device sent audio data to the host computer. This page contains notes, links and code extracts from this project relating to USB, USB Human Interface Devices, the 16C745 microprocessor, and specifics of this project. Hopefully this information will be helpful to your project. The code is written in assembly code.

Programming Linux USB device driver, Germany author.

A pure private project based upon Renases H8S for UART/USB emulation.

This project is about developing a library for USB functions for the AT43USB3XX family of devices; starting first with the '355.
libat43usb is in the very early stages. I am just getting my prototype hardware, the AvrUpod, soldered together. libat43usb will be targeted toward the '355 at first, but I hope that others will contribute code for the '32X and '38X series processors.

USB GPIO Pod is a simple USB to GPIO pod - allowing you to use a standard desktop to twiddle individual lines for interfacing with any 5v or 3.3v project (as most computers are lacking in parallel ports these days, which used to be useful for such purposes). The chips are an FTDI 232R usb converter, and an R8C/20 microcontroller. The 232R has an internal clock source, and provides a clock to the R8C, so no external clock circuitry is required. The 232R also connects to the pins on the R8C needed for programming, so the R8C can be programmed on the fly over the USB cable. Thus, you can download a custom control program to the R8C and communicate with it over the usb-serial link. Since many of the R8C pins are exposed in the headers, you can take advantage of the R8C's ADCs, interrupts, timers, etc.

This design uses the Microchip PIC 18F2450 or 18F2550 USB enabled microcontroller. The total parts cost is around $15 including the microcontroller for a single board. The board features a USB port that can be used with a bootloader for easy programming.

This project principally demonstrates the usage of a MSP430 controller with USB functionality. At a first glance, it seems somewhat curious to have an USB application with an ultralow power device.

A Gameboy flash catridge programming project based upon USB and NXP LPC ARM chip.

The USB FPGA Project is a set of tools that can be used to interface the PC with other hardware development boards through USB. Currently a couple different FPGA development boards are supported. The focus is to design and develop USB FPGA projects, providing a PC interface to different USB FPGA designs. On this site PC software, USB controller firmware, FPGA HDL, and other embedded firmware can be found. Cool stuff if you are going to programming FPGA chip.

Good entry point for all AVR/USB based projects. Amazing! The developers are brilliant.

Atmel AVR code example including a USB project.

Atmel AVR projects, however only available for register user.

This web presents a peripheral design using the HC908JB8. From Oliver Thamm.

A GPS receiver using Dallas Semiconductor's DS89C420 and National Semiconductor's USBN9603. From Yu Lu.

An example ALERT application is provided for the Atmel AT89C5131 USB micro-controller. The code includes a command-line user interface (CLI) with a"debug monitor" and a suite of OS functions to support various MCU resources, including on-chip UART, SPI, EEPROM and USB slave controller. The CLI is accessible via the UART or USB port.

The USB device stack uses the Communications Device Class (CDC), implementing a "virtual UART". The function library is ideal for USB-to-Serial converter applications. Windows (2000/XP) incorporates a USB CDC driver, so the host PC application software can communicate with the device via a "Virtual COM port". HyperTerminal may be used for testing.

A Powerswitch is an example using the Atmel AVR Microcontroller. From Objective Development Software GmbH. PowerSwitch provides 8 bits of parallel output intended to switch e.g. the power supply to electronic devices. The PowerSwitch firmware is accompanied by a command line tool for Unix to control the device. (The command line tool can also be compiled on Windows using minGW and libusb-win32.)

The YAMPP website (Yet another mp3 player) has links to the asm code of the project. An excellent source for designing a mp3 player with USB interface. Of course who will get MP3 without USB?