USB Bit Whacker (UBW)

[dusko]

A description of something called UBW is given at

http://greta.dhs.org/UBW/

It seems to me that UBW is nothing else but a "version" of PICAXE. What is in essence the difference (besides USB vs. RS232 communication)?

 

[MPep]

One of the main differences I can see is that in UBW you need to program in the bootloader yourself, in PICAXE it is done for you.
AND you are restricted to using PICs that have a USB interface.

Appears to use BASIC, so not too hard to change over if required.

Only had a brief look though as of yet.

 

[hippy]

UBW is not a general purpose standalone microcontroller like a PICAXE but an add-to-PC-via-USB interface to help PC based programs deal with the real world of I/O signals.

It is possible to write new firmware but that's going to be much harder than using Basic for the PICAXE.

It would be possible to turn UBW into a PICAXE but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for Rev-Ed to do it ... but they have surprised us before !

 

[demonicpicaxeguy]

i'm not sure if i'd be suprised if some time down the track rev-ed do byte the bullet and cave into usb, usb to serial adapters aren't going to be around forever and with usb 3.0 and whatever future version, it may even end up being the only port left on the pc
it's not as if there's an absence of pic's with the capabilities for it either... in saying that about usb the floppy disk did stick around for a hell of a long time

 

[Dippy]

Here we go again....

 

[hippy]

Mentioning UBW did inspire me to fire up PicBasic and EasyHID to generate a USB framework for an 18F2550 and this time round I actually managed to generate a .HEX file although not tested yet.

Looking at the code, it shouldn't be too hard to wrap PICAXE firmware around that but there are issues. A USB slave has to communicate with the PC host every 10ms or so or it may go AWOL so that could make SERIN, COUNT and PULSIN impossible to use in some situations, and PAUSE, SERVO and other timed output could have some timing jitter.

There's also the issue of how to bootload as well as do run-time comms via USB because the PC-side driver has to pass the 'break' and the PICmicro has to recognise it, but I believe there's a solution to that even if not perfect.

A PICAXE with USB even with a limited range of Basic commands would still be a useful proposition especially for people who wanted to do PC via USB interfacing which is what UBW offers.