[Noisebridge-discuss] Arduino questions

[Tymm Twillman]

On Jul 11, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Jonathan Foote wrote:

> 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.
> ______________________________

BTW, this (LUFA & other fine software for direct USB communications) also works on the Teensy, which I've found to be super easy to develop on... plus they have a great development setup that shims right into the Arduino IDE.

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Though I generally suggest for beginners to start with a full regular Arduino board (especially since there are so many examples that are easy to follow, and troubleshooting is more straight-forward if you're new to the whole embedded development thing).

And then too when things get comfortable it's not too hard to move to things like Ethernet shields, etc.