BMOW is now USB-enabled for PC communication, for both reads and writes. Yahoo!

I wrote a simple program to log when the USB interface goes up and down, and to echo all bytes received from the PC to BMOW’s LCD. The program also adds one to each received byte before transmitting it back, so I could prove it was transmitting real data and I wasn’t seeing some local echo. The result was that whatever letter I typed on the PC, the next letter of the alphabet got sent back in reply. Here’s the Windows Hyperterminal session:

The whole exercise went very smoothly, and I didn’t have to do any debugging at all. Once I got the USBMOD4 in place, it all worked on the first attempt you see here.

The only wrinkle was with the USBMOD4 itself. I bought one months ago that was damaged in shipping: some pins were broken off. Futurlec sent me a replacement, but I didn’t open it until yesterday, only to discover it was the wrong part! After scouring the USBMOD4 data sheet, I worked out a modified solution that let me use the damaged module, which was only possible because all but one of the broken pins were ground pins. I ended up needing to desolder a SMD component on the USBMOD4 body, which was ugly, and I was also forced to use the integrated USB jack rather than the external USB jack I’d planned on. But I can live with the little flaws… and hey, now I’ve got USB!