Homebrew card: Magazine article on USB, a floating point PIC

[Doug Fortune <pentam-at-home.com>]

For anyone interested in persuing the USB route, the March 2000
issue of Nuts & Volts has an article "Put USB in Your Projects"
by Jan Axelson (jan-at-lvr.com), who also has a book "USB Complete:
Everything you need to Design Custom USB Peripherals".

Two Cypress prototyping kits are mentioned, $99 and $499:
http://www.cypress.com/usb/index.html

Two more sub $100 vendors of experimentor kits:
http://www.activewireinc.com         ($59,  16 I/O pins)
http://usbsimm.home.att.net            ($79, 20  I/O pins)

Although current  USB data rates <= 12 Mbits/s, the next
standard is likely to be 400 Mbits/s.   Another nice thing
for card developers is that logic power is available from
the USB cable (down from the computer of course).

Lastly, Jan states "If you'd like to see more USB articles in
N&V, please let me know.  I'm also interested if there's a
particular USB related topic you are interested in."

 - - -
On a slightly different topic, there was a discussion about
using a PIC as a local mini-controller, but it was felt that
the lack of floating point support would hamper things.

There is a PIC with floating point support, programmed in
a Visual Basic subset (I am a C guy myself...), chip for $29
and development kit for $99
http://www.basicx.com

It also has 8 TTL  I/O lines and 8 A/D converters (or 16 I/O lines).
I don't know much about  analog +/-  10v servo feedback, but it seems
to me that having  8 of those simultaneously simplifies a number of
things for an 8 axis analog servo controller.

If one was building a stepper feedback, the 16 lines could be used to
decode 8 encoderized axes as well.

Who is game for discussing that one?

Doug Fortune
pentam-at-home.com