Category Archives: USB

Articles involving USB interfaces

SmallyMouse2 – Universal USB to Quadrature Mouse Adapter

SmallyMouse2 is a universal USB to quadrature mouse adapter for many 8-bit and 16-bit retro computers and allows the use of modern USB mice on machines such as the Acorn BBC Micro, Acorn Master, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and many more.  Unlike most existing mouse adapters, SmallyMouse2 implements a fully USB compatible interface […]

USB to Quadrature Mouse Adapter

SmallyMouse is a project that creates a USB mouse adaptor for 8-bit Acorn computers including the BBC Micro and Master series machines.  SmallyMouse can emulate the two most popular user-port mice made for the BBC – the AMX mouse and the Marconi RB2 trackball (as used in the BBC Domesday project) and provides a small […]

Nintendo Four Score USB

The Nintendo Four Score is a 4 port joystick adaptor for the original 8-bit NES console which allowed you to plug in 4 joysticks (or ‘joypads’) and play compatible 4 player games. Since my daughter wanted to play some of the NES classics such as Zelda and Mario Bros. I decided to purchase on of […]

Mini xum1541

The mini xum1541 is a USB to Commodore IEC serial adaptor which allows you to connect a Commodore 1541 floppy to a modern PC. The design is based on the ZoomFloppy board and the xum1541 firmware provided by Nate Lawson which he has kindly made available under a GNU General Public License. The mini xum1541 is […]

Stylophone Studio 5

The Stylophone Studio 5 is a project to recreate the original 1968 Dubreq Stylophone which sounds and reacts just like the original (and even contains a replica of the original circuitry) however it also fully supports both MIDI in and MIDI out over USB and can be controlled by studio software such as Cubase. There […]

USB Generic HID Open Source Framework for Atmel AVR and Windows

The Atmel AVR range of USB capable devices provides a wide-range of functionality and peripherals to the professional and hobbyist; however the additional complexity of both microcontroller firmware and host PC drivers is a tall barrier to anyone wishing to get started with USB development. Although the firmware is greatly simplified by freely available open-source […]

AVR ATmega32U4 USB Development Board

Recently I’ve started working with the Atmel AVR range of microcontrollers. The relatively new range of USB capable ATmega chips are an excellent choice for USB device development, however they are only available in surface-mount packages which represents a barrier to a lot of hobbyists since you cannot simply plug the chip into a breadboard […]

PC Case USB LCD

For the first version of my Open Source Framework for USB Generic HID devices based on the PIC18F and Windows I made a quick example of how to use the library using a USB interface for an LCD. Now that I’ve completed the second version of the library I thought it would be fun to […]

USB RGB LED VU Meter

This project creates a RGB LED VU Meter which is controlled via USB by a Windows 7 or Vista host machine. The project serves several purposes: Firstly, it demonstrates how to read audio information from the Windows machine and pass this over USB to the device (which is a question which popped up several times […]

USB Performance Monitor

The USB Performance monitor is a PIC18F2550 based device which shows the performance of your computer using two analogue meters and a RGB LED. The design is based around a stock Hi-Fi VU-meter which is controlled using PWM from the PIC18F microcontroller. This project was inspired by a friend of mine who wanted a way […]