EZ-USB

Is anyone actively working on a USB motion control interface?

I've been doing some looking into what would be involved,
and am getting tempted by the EZ-USB line from Cypress
(they bought out Anchor, which started it).

Basically these are 8051 microcontollers that hang off the USB bus.
The cool part is that the code for them can be downloaded over the
bus. The newer EZ-USB2 chips (which are all PQFP surface mount) go
for about $35. Development boards based on the older chips are about
$60-80.

It seems like it should be possible to get these devices to emulate a
subset of the ISA bus to work with existing designs, to talk to
something like the LS Digital encoder chips, and possibly to do step
pulse generation or direct PWM for a servo amp.

Chris

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble tracking down the state of USB
support under rtlinux - which is needed before EMC could use such a
device - in my mind a gating issue to making it worthwhile.

--
Christopher C. Stratton, stratton@...
Instrument Maker, Horn Player & Engineer
22 Adrian Street, Somerville, MA 02143
http://www.mdc.net/~stratton
NEW PHONE NUMBER: (617) 628-1062 home, 253-2606 MIT