i figured the usual way these days was for your arduino to send it’s data back over the ftdi usb link?

more seriously, you could probably crack open one of your cheap usb/rs-232 adapters, strip out the level converter they attached to an ftdi chip and then just have an ftdi cable.

@Adam Outler

You think so? Why don’t you axe him a question?

@Satiagraha: I like the cut of your jib!

wanna get in on this duel!

This is far far from new, even sparkfun makes a board to help matters along:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331

im a geologist. I do not understand the usefulness of this hack. You people need to understand that in life sometimes time is better wasted on other things, like geologists understand well. get a life. get a real useful hack. peace and long live the earth and mother nature.

- heady brosevelt

I bet for the other side, it involves a rectifier, a capacitor, and either a linux audio device for proper control, or prerecorded sounds which will be turned into much lower frequencies by the rectifier and capacitor….. just a guess

Price was a criteria he mentioned several times. probably important for a future doctor that may be some time from their first good payday. No doubt at at 6x the cost of this solution the sparkfun product would have been rejected as well. In that amateur radio operators have been using computer sound cards as 1200 baud RF modems for years, this should be plenty fast enough. When you are the only one quite a bit of data can be passed at 1200 over the course of a day. Yea a patch cord would be my first choice, but if the best your junk box has to offer is bell wire..

I just wish there was a company that made a TTL -> USB serial chip in one package, instead of TTL -> MAX232 -> FTDI. That would be much simpler, 1 chip, no level conversion, etc…

Perhaps this chip already exists, if so, please enlighten!

this would also be quite usefull if you connect th uC to a mp3 player that has a mic input, to store be able to store more data

hahaha. now *this* is cool.

Someone hacking together a flash drive inside a tape for your PC which in combination with any old cheap tape recorder emulates a Commodore 16/Speccy tape drive in 3..2..1… Pwned.
I love the sound of tapes spinning in the morning… :) :) Anyone for a nostalgia trip?

Actually I looked into using my Creative Zen for ambulatory multichannel EEG monitoring via LM567 based sound input as it has dual mic inputs.
Sadly it is no more, it is demised. I gave it away to a friend “just to see if he could fix it” but methinks it is a brick as the FW recovery fails and it won’t even charge any more :-(

Cheap Bluetooth headsets also work well. I actually got as far as getting a reliable on/off switch via LM567 detected tone before finding that it was prone to RF interference.

I watched the video with curiosity for why he used an external USB sound card and soldered the uC to the connectors directly instead of soldering a standard jack to the uC cables and used the integrated sound card. It would be transferable to any sound device.
I’ve previously used a similar hack to talk with an N900. It uses the 4-conductor jack variant as both stereo output and mono input are in the same connector. Additionally, a specific resistance needs to be used on the mic conductor before the N900 detects the inserted “headphones” as a microphone equipped set.

PIC18F13K50 is about one dollar with full speed USB2.0

I don’t like when hi say “…but I’m just a dentist” while trying to teach others.

Also, MAX232N is about 30 to 50 cents, not 5 dollars he say!

@Scott: I was wrong/unclear. At 44 kHz sampling rate you could maybe transfer up to 44 kiloBytesPerSecond. If you can force your card to sample 192 000 times per second, and each sample is 1 byte, you may be able to reach about 192 kiloBytesPerSecond.
All in all a useful hack that could work with broad range of computer architectures.

Do you guys have a technical editor or anything?

>>The usual way send data from
>>a microcontroller is either over RS-232
>>with MAX232 serial ICs

Is it? really? What about i2c, can, spi etc?

>>crystals,

Since when did a max232 or any of its clones need a crystal?

>>bit-banging the USB protocol

Why do you need to do that? USB to UART chips exist and are cheap… you can get the CP21xx chips on a board ready to go for a few dollars. Probably cheaper than the USB sound card he used..

While this is neat and cool .. the copy hackaday comes up with to make out that things like this are somehow useful or a must have for “our” projects are bizarre to say the least.

My 3.3v lv-ttl cable of choice: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/data-cable-compatible-with-nokia-ca-42-446

@signal7 – What alternatives are cheaper than the FT-223RL? Alternatives are exactly what I’m seeking!

@cantido – It was implied I was referring to “from a microcontroller to a computer”. Also, clock rate is critical to error rate when using a level converter to connect a MCU to a PC via serial port. I’ll look into CP21xx! Is it DIP and bread-boardable? USB sound card is $1.30 shipped.

@Isotope – lol, I can’t justify buying a $17.95 cable (plus shipping?) to send a few numbers from a $1 microchip to my computer.

@defyboy – that’s a cool product! Is it supported for Linux and windows XP, Vista, and 7? Oops, the page says “Drivers don’t seem to work on Windows 7″

@filisoft – next cutting-edge step will be to design an “audio modem” to allow data to be communicated over a phone line to bring back the dialup BBS

@scott:

Note that I said, “if you don’t need usb”. Bearing that in mind:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8780

SFE charges a lot for this circuit (for what it is). You could buy the components from digikey and prototype it yourself for even less.

@jj: Thanks for the tip! I think I looked at that chip before when looking at options for micro controller pc communication w/o serial ports, but didn’t like the packaging (I prefer breadboardability, though I suppose I could bend the pins and dead-bug it). Not terribly cheap either, especially if you want/need the breakout board from SparkFun.

@hans – “Are idiots at work here?” Quite possible! While I agree “they usually don’t have problems”, the small lot of USB serial adapter dongles I purchased are quite a problem. They’re some no-brand Chinese things not supported on Linux or Windows 7 (my fault for buying them), and I was too discouraged to go back online and pay (and wait) for a replacement. Again, I just wanted a few numbers from my microchip to my PC, and this zero-component solution was a pretty solid way to make that happen with the parts I had on hand.