Development Platform Eases USB Data Acquisition

Pairing a Microchip microcontroller with the company's Vinculum USB host controller IC, the DLP-VLOG development platform performs as a simple data-logging application for reading temperature, humidity, and voltage data and storing it on a supplied, 32-MB USB flash drive. It provides a complete reference design on which to base new Vinculum development as well as being a starting point for similar data-acquisition applications. The Vinculum chip provides USB-host capability to MCU-based products that previously did not have the hardware resources available. When interfacing to flash drives, the device manages the file allocation table structure via a command set. It employs 8- and 32-bit custom processor cores, dual DMA controllers, 64K of embedded flash, and 4K of SRAM. Features include two USB 2.0 low and full speed, host and slave ports, UART, SPI, and parallel FIFO interfaces, a PS2 legacy keyboard and mouse interface, and up to 28 GPIOs depending on configuration. The DLP-VLOG development kit includes a C compiler, device programmer/debugger, C source code for the MCU, and two Windows utility programs for converting data to floating point values and setting up the real-time clock. The price of the DLP-VLOG is $250.00. FUTURE TECHNOLOGY DEVICES INTERNATIONAL LTD. (USA), Hillsboro, OR. (503) 547-0988.