Rant mode: on.

You've touched on a subject which bugs the heck out of me. USB.

The industry has moved from one of the simplest--if not THE simplest--serial interface (RS232) that works on devices costing pennies to a much more complicated serial interface (USB) which many components aren't capable of communicating with, requires more circuitry, and requires drivers on the host system that sometimes work, sometimes don't, and are generally available only for Windows leaving Linux users out in the dark. I counted myself lucky when my USB keyboard, USB mouse, and USB digital camera worked on Linux (the latter with some trial and error). But what happens when I want to put together some hardware that talks to my PC? Am I supposed to use a USB-capable chip every time and write a device driver for Windows (which I don't use) or Linux (for which I'm not proficient in writing device drivers)? Even those that happily use Windows would have to write a Windows program and a Windows USB driver to support their new hardware product.

USB drives me crazy. Yes, it has its purpose but so does traditional RS232. I am constantly annoyed by my laptop (purchased in 2002) which doesn't include a serial port. So now whenever I do development I inevitably develop on my laptop and have to copy the hex file over to an old 450Mhz Pentium I bought back in 1999 or so and use that to interact with my project. Now that I'm using parallel port ISP at least I can download directly from my laptop to the project, but I still need to do the serial I/O using the old machine. And I suppose it's only a matter of time before they decide they need to get rid of parallel ports, too.

I probably need to get a USB->serial adapter (and hope it works with Linux) but, as usual, I live in Mexico and things just aren't as easy to find here.

Rant mode: off.

Regards,
Craig Steiner