Creating an HID device

[giuseppe]

Hello all.

I have been thinking about a next project to do and I think I know but am a little lost on how to do it. I want to take a bunch of normally open buttons and connect them to the picaxe. I would then continuously poll these buttons for their status. But, I want to send the button states to the computer. I actually want to make a gamepad. I searched around the internet a bit and found out that a family of PICs have built in HID support for 2.0 USB. Now, I wouldn't mind going that route but I kinda want to do it with a picaxe since I got a bunch of them here. Since there are no picaxe chips with USB support is there some sort of IC that can go between the computer and picaxe? Something like where I would send data to the IC and the IC would then send it over to the USB port.

Also, I kinda want the solution to require no drivers. A nice plug n play kind of setup.

Anyone did this kind of thing before?

 

[MPep]

There are USB interface chips around, look at Maxim and FTDI. However, they will become a COMM port interface .
These people may have something you'll like: http://www.hexwax.com/home.aspx or these: http://www.silabs.com/products/interface/usbtouart/Pages/default.aspx.

There is another but I cannot think of it right now

 

[Jamster]

Errr... We can do Non HID Compliant...?

 

[KeithRB]

USB hosting generally puts lots of responsibility on the PC host - it is cheaper that way. But there is this:
http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/VNC1L.htm