Need help to start with USB

"aleksa" <aleksaZR@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:282ffd5b-e125-48bf-96a7-7b6610400c70@o14g2000vbo.googlegroups.com...
> First of all, thanks everyone for your replies.
>
> I am currently looking into MAX3421E and hoping that the guy at
> http://www.circuitsathome.com/mcu/programming/lightweight-usb-hostpart-1
> knows what he is doing.
>
> Don mentioned ghielectronics:
> it's promising, cheap, 16$, but goes to 70$ with shipping..
> plus a lot of people (as I read it quickly) has problems with it.
>
> Richard, thanks for the usb-in-a-nutshell link! As it turns out,
> I already had it in my favorites, but who can find it there..
>
> As for the card readers... not sure, yet.

The question was more to what your application needs. If your device is 
copying from one USB stick to a another, the CF or SD solutions of course 
don't apply. OTOH, if you're looking at data acquisition, for example, SD 
cards are dead simple (relatively speaking) to integrate.

>
> I got a headache just by looking into a list of links I have to visit.

As things go, having a myriad of choices is a nice "problem" to have.

On Sat, 02 May 2009 21:28:27 +0200, Frank-Christian Kr�gel wrote:

> Your AT89C5131 has only got an USB device interface. For USB host you 
> need something bigger, eg. an ARM9. For writing a complete USB base and 
> mass storage host from scratch you will need at least half a year, most 
> probably more.

You don't need to go up quite that far. Some of the PIC24 chips can act as
a USB host; Microchip's USB SDK includes a demo program for logging to a
USB thumb drive.

aleksa <aleksaZR@gmail.com> writes:

> I need to read/write sectors on
> USB flash memory mass storage.
> (I hope this is the correct title)
>
> AFAIK, this has two requirements:
>
> 1. hardware: USB connection.
> 2. software: handshaking with USB devices.
>
> I think/hope that (1) will be easily solved with AT89C5131.
>
> That leaves me with number 2:
> Is the protocol freely available?
> What is the protocol's name, ie. what am I searching for?
>
> Again, I want to read/write sectors.

In the november 2008 issue of Elektor there was an article about the
new Vinculum chip from FTDi. It is a usb host controller.

http://www.vinculum.com/products.html

 S.