USB Host For Propeller Micros

[Micah Dowty] has implemented full speed USB host control on a Propeller microcontroller. He’s motivated by the thought of using USB based WiFi and Bluetooth dongles in his projects as ready-made solutions.We’ve seen USB host control with the Arduino and it really opens up the flood gates for advancing your projects through storage, wireless connectivity, and user interface.

So far his work is fairly preliminary but the results seen from other participants in the Parallax forums are very positive. Check out his code from the subversion repository and lend a hand with the development.

[Thanks Stefan via Adafruit]

15 thoughts on “USB Host For Propeller Micros

  1. This is a horribly irresponsible post. USB carries a full five volts of DC power, and if someone happens to hook up a transformer to that 5v, it could be stepped up to over 50KV and kill someone!

    How dare HAD post something like this!?!

  2. From the forum post: “It uses four cogs, requires overclocking the Prop to 96 MHz, and even though the line rate is 12 Mb/s the actual usable data throughput is significantly lower.”

    So not the most usable solution in the end.

  3. @Elias – Almost all the Propeller Boards have removable xtals, so adding a 6Mhz xtal is easy and you’ve still got 100 MIPS available for the rest of your program.

    It is rough, but I think it’s pretty usable already.

  4. @Phelps
    USB 5v could be stepped up to 50kv, but it would have such little amperage that it would never kill anyone. Hell, even static shocks to a doorknob on a dry day can be 10kv to 500kv.

  5. Oh, and getting USB Host to work is the easy part.
    Trying to get the datasheet for the radio chipset inside the dongle is what’s really difficult.
    For some weird reason manufacturers don’t like embedded systems and don’t want us to use their products.

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