USB serial converters / Re: USB

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 2:25 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: My understanding is, the HID device class is somewhat standardized for keyboards, joysticks, mice and the like, where no specific driver is necessary apart from what's built-in typically to the OS, but other things like an RS-232 passthrough for example there are more or less "standard" drivers for, or at least generic ones that you can leverage, provided you can give enough detail about the device during enumeration and which driver to use. I did a little class through Freescale to do a serial device and both Windows and Ubuntu had driver capability that you could interface with, but you still needed to equate the vendor id/device id to the proper driver through an .inf file in the case of Windows, and I can't recall what you had to do through Ubuntu, but a driver was available there to be used as well. I've been wanting to stick my toe in and develop something for USB for a while (a USB->Coleco ADAMNet adapter to allow use of actual devices with an emulator), but ultimately I think I'd like to be able to offer it up to the community easily. One stumbling block in there has already been mentioned: vendor IDs are controlled by the USB-IF, and if you want one of your very own, it'll cost you $2000 to get it (last I checked), more if you want to use the USB logo (who cares?), but the $2k is a significant hurdle for the tinkerer. I suppose you could pick VIDs that don't clash with whatever devices you have installed on the machine, but then that takes away from the universal nature of the USB...