USB interface testing, Diagnostics

[Phriendly]

Mark,
From trying to help get anothers USB working from Robs online site I have the following thoughts.

The person is able to connect up to the USB, but not the I2C. What I'm thinking is having a connector on the USB board that is a 6 pin like the remote. The person can plug their JP1 cable back into their board and loop-back the signals to the Delcom chip. We are only using 3 out of the 12 bits. This would give the person who is building or diagnosing a tool for helping them.
This would not be as easy as the parallel interface test. But it would give information that they would otherwise not have.

The interface test would then manually send/test bits for all 3 port bits to make sure they are all working correctly. Then report pass, fail (what failed and posible fixes like the existing software).

I'm going to post this online also for others comments.

Joe.

[Castlestone]

Joe, back in September you made a suggestion for a loop around JP1 connector for testing which I think is a great idea.

Another feature that I would like to see is an LED dirven by one of the outputs which flashes when data is being uploaded or downloaded. I don't know what the clock rate is but if the LED changed states every n-th bit transmitted such that it flashed rapidly would be a helpful indicator. Much the same as a disk drive activity LED.

I'm surprised at how little discussion there is on the USB interface. It is pretty straight forward and it works great but I thought there would be more discussion.

Thanks, Mike

[Phriendly]

Mike,
I later found there is an output that can be programed to indicate when the USB comunications are present. This output would drive a LED. I haven't tried this yet, but will soon.

Joe.