AVR-Chat

> http://www.ftdichip.com/

Ummm... not quite.  The link I was responding to was someone's small 
board that allowed an ordinary microcontroller to easily access a 
FAT32 file system mounted on an MMC.  The original post was along the 
lines of wanting to do the same thing, albeit with USB memory 
sticks.  It's a complicated enough application that the 'small 
interface board' approach would probably make sense for a lot of 
applications.

> Speaking of USB connectivity, the FTDI chip offers legacy support 
for 
> the serial bus to USB.  This seems to be a common way to connect 
USB 
> to a microcontroller.   

If you don't need particularly high performance, yes it is.  FTDI has 
been around a long time now and their support appears to be excellent 
and the chips have gone through enough revisions that they're not 
quite full-featured.  For boards that already have serial port 
interfaces, it's something of a no-brainer, high quality solution.  

> This method also offers the possibility of the program on the PC 
> recognising your device name so your device name will show up on 
the 
> screen when it is pluggged in.   

Well, if you have an LCD or other display, any microcontroller can do 
that!

> As I understand this part, to be 
> recognized as the onwer of a specifi name, you need to register and 
> buy the name.  

Yes, and it's not cheap... $1500.  People occasionally talk about 
someone making a 'group buy' of a vendor ID and then selling the 
individual device IDs for just a few bucks (since there are 65536 
device IDs per vendor IDs!), but I've yet to see that successfully 
happen.  (It seems to be one of those things that many people like 
the idea of, but unless you're actually going to _sell_ your product, 
the approach of just using an arbitrary ID works just fine... hence 
few people are willing to even pony up, say, $20 for an ID...)

---Joel Kolstad