USB question

rjo__

I know that USB is common enough so that my question will have been answered thousands of times, if I knew enough
about USB to actually look in the right place, but apparently I don't.

USB is serial... on the face of it, that would limit a micro-controller's ability to act as a hub to the rate the micro-controller can handle any kind of serial communications... For USB 1.x it looks like the slowest transfer rates are way above normal micro-controllers to handle...

But that limit could be mitigated greatly by converting USB to parallel. For example... even now the P2v is able to achieve 1.2Mb/s
serial even though the serial is going through a usb<-> simple serial translation. So it seems reasonable that a USB->8bit parallel device would enable the P2 to act as a USB 1 hub. No?

Seairth

I'm assuming you are talking about software implementations of USB. Most microcontrollers that have USB capabilities provide specific hardware support.

However, why wouldn't the P2 be able to do 12Mbit/s directly?

rjo__

I must have misread the standard... I thought it was greater~ 12MB/sec... and then I thought... no problem if it arrives 1 byte at a time:)

I have been thinking about the Kinect... It requires USB3, but the data streams arrive independently of one another. So the actual data rate for the 16 bit depth data is actually fairly modest. I was thinking that if we could get the P2 as a USB1 host, then it would be a matter of getting someone to rape the USB3 channel. Usually there is a lot of hair pulling about standards, but in my mind it isn't a matter of standards. It is a matter of taking advantage of the standards... and who (around here) might be in the proper mood:)