[Noisebridge-discuss] Arduino questions

[Jonathan Foote]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 10:27 AM, dpc <weasel at meer.net> wrote:
>> I heard some of the USB chips and stacks are flaky, and I want
>> strictly FLOSS tools, so I asked around, and arduino seems to be
>> highly recommended.
>>
>> So, where should I start?  How do I start?
>
> if you want usb from your thingee to a pc-ish monitoring thingee you can
> still talk serial over usb. the ftdi parts seem to be popular, and my
> experience w/ them has been positive.

I second the ftdi recommendation, I've used them dozens of times and
they are solid and Just Work.
The drivers are closed-source to my knowledge, but there are
open-source variants like libusb.

Depending on your requirements I can also recommend the LUFA USB
stack. It won't run on an arduino, but it will run on an Atmel at90
USBKEY dev board ($20 at digikey). This is pretty powerful: you can
make your board instantiate as pretty much any USB device, like a USB
storage device or HID mouse. For example, you can make your device
look like a keyboard  and generate keypress events, so you don't even
need drivers on the host.