AVR-Chat

Hi,

as I wrote earlier my butterfly based project is probably dead. So I'm 
considering alternatives. The goal is a focuser for my telescope and it 
will need to talk to a host PC. At first I intended to use RS232 for 
that but as you know many laptops don't have that interface any more so 
native USB seems more natural. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it 
is to hook up an AT90USBxxx device to a USB port. Two zeners is all it 
takes. The devices also aren't expensive. So I'm a little surprised I 
can't find any boards out there that use one of these chips, put a USB 
connector on the board and provide pads for the IO pins to an experiment 
area ala Graham's butterfly carrier. Graham, if you don't have one 
planned yet, this may be something to consider. We can talk more about 
features if you like but it would basically be a butterfly carrier with 
an AT90USB82 instead of a bf.

Maybe I missed one so if you know of someone who sells such a starter 
kit, please let me know. I know Atmel sells a few kits but they have too 
many bells and whistles for my purposes. Then again if you think I 
missed one that's worth trying, please let me know.

I've also looked at http://gnusb.sourceforge.net/ and may try to port 
that to mega163 or mega48 (I have those in my parts box). But I think 
I'd prefer to use a dedicated USB enabled AVR.

Thanks,

    Sander