USB Host Controller Board

USB Host Board

The USB Host Board is based around the Microchip 24FJ64GB002 microcontroller which contains a built-in full-speed USB host controller. This allows the board to interface with and control any USB slave device - flash drives, keyboards, digital cameras, bluetooth dongles, and much more!

Because the board is based on a fully programmable microcontroller, not just a generic USB host chip, it has a number of major advantages over other USB Host controller boards

1. The driver software is contained on the USB Host board completely seperate from your application
2. We have written USB driver software so that it does what you want right out of the box. We currently have available
   • Flash Memory Stick - Read and Write data to files on a USB flash drive
   • USB Keyboard - Converts a standard USB keyboard into a serial TTL device generating ASCII characters
   See Related Products tab for more details on software available
3. It contains a bootloader so no expensive programmer is necessary

Other USB Host boards that are based on a generic USB host chip require you to write the driver software within your own application code. Although there are some libraries available for the Arduino platform they are quite basic and also take up valuable programming space in your microcontroller.  So what we have done with ours is installed a bootloader and provided you with free, fully functional and easy to use software.

Main Features of the USB HOST Board

• Bootloader installed. Easy programming via serial connection and ds30loader software
• Free downloadable software
• Microchip 24FJ64GB002 Microcontroller
• Works with both 5V and 3.3V systems
• 64Kb program space and 4Kb data available
• Real Time Clock
• One-board 3.3V 350mA regulator with output
• Orange POWER LED
• Green LED indicated bootloader active or USB device inserted.
• All pins are 5V tolerant so will work with 5V and 3.3V microcontrollers.
• Board size 46mm x 27mm

External connections to the USB Host board

• 5V power supply
• 3.3V output (350mA)
• RX and TX
• SDA and SCL for I2C communication
• SDI, SCK, SDO, SS for SPI communication

Downloading Software to the board

You can write your own software for the USB Host Board or you can download one of our free software applications. Downloading software to the board is easy because it has a bootloader already installed. You can download software using the free ds30loader application

Run the ds30loader application and...

• Select the hex file you wish to upload
• Set the device to be PIC24FJ and 64GB002
• Set Baud rate to 115200
• Set Port to your serial port connection

Once you have these setup, click on the Write button just below the Commands menu and the software will attempt to connect to the bootloader. In order to make the bootloader active we can do one of two things:

• Remove and re-apply the power
• Reset the board - briefly connect the reset pin to earth. The reset pin is the right hand pin on the 5-way header at the top of the board (next to the white triangle). Connect this to the centre (0V) pin and the device will reset.

See the screenshot below for an example.