Archive for the 'USB Wombat' Category
USB to ADB Keyboard/Mouse Adapter
I’ve begun looking into options for a USB-to-ADB adapter, to enable use of modern USB keyboards and mice on vintage Macintosh and Apple IIgs hardware. There’s no real “meat” to this yet, as I’m just looking at parts availability and searching for relevant example code, but every project has to begin somewhere.
I did a search to find the cheapest microcontroller with USB Host support (actually USB OTG), and the winner was the Microchip PIC32MX. I know zero about developing with PICs, but how hard can it be? Actually I’ve heard that older PICs were quite awkward to work with, but the PIC32 is a modern RISC-type design.
Microchip sells a PIC32 USB Starter Kit III for $59. I’m not quite sure what this is yet, but it’s probably a better starting point than a bare PIC32 chip.
The kit has an 8 MHz crystal. Will that be enough? Is it replaceable? The PIC32MX is rated to 40-50 MHz depending on the version, but I’m not sure I’ll actually need that speed.
Do I need a USB OTG cable for the finished product? Can the hardware support two attached USB devices (mouse and keyboard), or a USB hub?
What’s this about the MPLAB C compiler reverting to optimization level 1 (no optimization) after 60 days?
So many questions.
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