30 Apr
2012
30 Apr
'12
9:46 a.m.
On 4/30/2012 11:53 AM, David Riley wrote:
USB is great for what it's great at, but it does
have a nasty habit
of unnecessarily complicating simple things.
I don't disagree with you here. But this is what our computers/mobos
ship with now. This is how we connect our keyboards, mice, printers, usb
flash drives, scanners, external harddrives, logic analyzers, webcams,
and so on.
The ubiquity has staying power and momentum. All my (current computers
including laptops) have and support USB, and I've got plenty of ports
available. It's easy and convenient.
They could probably do
a relatively simple hack and put an FT245 (USB->parallel FIFO) chip
on there that would work with some modifications, but then to make it
work on Windows, you have to make it install a driver (regardless of
whether you're using libusb or not).
True, but the FTDI drivers for windows are certified and work very well.
I've used them (created software and hardware) with Windows 7. The
documentation that ships with the Windows DLLs is pretty good --- and I
successfully drove them through Java via JNI.
It really does a good job of
mucking up the simple things when you can bang something together
that "just works" on a parallel port, and it's aimed towards people
who can justify hanging onto some legacy equipment if they want to
burn some EPROMs.
And while I like some of my legacy equipment (ala Amiga, namely) --- I
would never buy a peripheral in 2012 that relies on me keeping an
old-ish x86 PC around. I want a new product designed for new machines --
or at least one that is currently supported on new machines.
I like USB well enough, especially for the more
complex things that
it's good at (and the higher speed is certainly a plus), but I very
much resent how much higher the barrier to entry is for a USB
peripheral versus a simple serial/parallel port one.
As someone who likes to build some hobby devices, I too, don't like the
barrier to entry to USB. And yes, serial and parallel are easy and
straight-forward.
BUT AS A CONSUMER, I want something that connects to my computer like
all my other devices. Something that does not require anything special.
A USB eeprom burner that I can use on any of my current desktop/laptop
computers is what I want.
Keith