Microchip USB: Part 1 For the last few weeks I've been skirting
around USB, looking at USB to serial adapters and even talking
to some off-the-shelf USB hardware using libusb. Of course, the
next big step is to just go ahead and build something that
actually attaches as a USB HID device. There's lots of support
for this if you get the right microcontroller, and the list
grows longer every day. I finally decided to get started with
the Microchip PIC solution. I happened to have some PIC 18F2550
chips handy and I recently wrote about my experiences with
MPLAB-X on Linux and the ICD 3 programmer/debugger. One nice
thing about Microchip parts is the pin outs rarely change. The
PIC 18F2550 has the familiar 28 pin footprint you expect from a
PIC. A few pins are unique to the USB-nature of the part, of
course. For example, port C loses a pin to the Vusb function and
two more pins if you actually use the onboard USB peripheral.
Still, it was easy enough to connect the device to a breadboard
for initial testing. I had