USB in python
Diez B. Roggisch
deets at nospam.web.de
Fri Jan 23 01:58:48 EST 2009
Astan Chee schrieb:
> Diez B. Roggisch wrote:
>> Astan Chee wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hi,
>>> Im trying to write a program for my USB device and I'm thinking of using
>>> python to do this. The USB device is of my own making and it is
>>> activated when one of the two data pins of the USB is given about 5V (or
>>> similar to whatever the power pin is getting). Now I'm confused to if
>>> the software to activate this can actually be written and how do I do
>>> it? Any examples? I've seen pyUSB but it doesn't give me control over
>>> the hardware and how much power is going through the data pins.
>>>
>> Unless I'm not getting something here.
>>
>>
>>
> Hi,
> Thanks for all the responses but I forgot to mention that I have very
> little hardware understanding (at least in english) and the device
> itself it very simple and only needs about 5V power to be active. The
> problem here is that I want to control when the device is active using a
> computer so I thought USB might be a good choice since its simple (but
> didn't turn out to be). I'm open to any other suggestions on how I might
> achieve this hardware and software-wise (as in what interface should I
> use, etc). Also I'm trying to stay away from (complex) micro controllers.
> Any ideas?
Others suggested the parallel port. It is the natural choice for such
things, with two caveats:
- it is legacy, and thus often not available on modern hardware,
especially on mobile ones. So if you want it be prepared to additionally
buy a usb2parallel-adapter.
- it's electrical specs aren't as robust I fear. USB allos up to 500mA
to be drawn, and shouldn't break if you try more & fail (albeit, that
might be something that isn't true all the time). So you can draw quite
a bit of current from it (the stupid USB-cup-warmers are an example of
that). I have often had broken parallel-ports, and I think the reason is
that they *ARE NOT* specified to drive anything - they only provide
low-current control-lines. So whatever you design, you need a second
power-source then.
All in all, using a USB-controller is IMHO the best solution. The
AT90USBKey is a low-cost evaluation-board. ATMEL provides quite a bit of
example-code, and there is other FOSS available.
I have to admit though that the whole USB-topic isn't the easiest thing.
Diez
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