CC1100 and USP to SPI bridge

[bokzsamot]

Hi everyone

I use CC1100 transceivers in my project. On the one side I use msp430 TI uC. I need to transmit data to the PC. On the PC side I've used so far the mcp2210 brige. This bridge is very easy in use and simple to program. I've written simple C# application form and I am able to write settings to the transceiver on the PC side as well to transmit and receive packets. The only problem with this solution is, that mcp2210 works in HID class so it is much too slow - practically 8kB/s. I need to read data from time to time from the flash memory via cc1100 and such slow transfer is not acceptable. I was looking for another bridges and i found some FTDI ICs and cp2130. These circuits are quite similar to mcp2210, but work in another USB class, also .dll libraries are available for them. Has anyone had to deal with some of these? Or maybe someone has another concept how to simply interface cc1100 witch PC via USB? I was thinking also of using another msp430 uC on the PC side, because in this configuration I can transfer data from cc1100 through SPI witch 10MHz frequency so I am only limited by the speed of radio modules. I could use in this case mcp2210 only to configuring the second device and store the data in external memory like SD card or something but this solution is ugly. The best concept is to use some uC witch USB module. Then I can use SimplicTI protocol and I do not have to worry about the stuff like frames, ACK etc. I even run this between two msp430 uCs, but none of them has USB module and even if it had, I don't think I will be able program it (I need C# app on PC). So if anyone has any clues, I will be grateful.

 

[KlausST]

Hi,

i have uset FTDI devices.
FT232 for USB <--> UART
and FT245 for USB <--> parallel bus

both are very simple to use.
On the PC side you can choose to work with a virtual com port or directely with your application using dll drivers.
On the ucontroller side a simple UART with or without hardware handshake or the parallel port with built in bidirectional FIFOs.

The enumberation, entegrity check and USB flow control is completely done by the chips/drivers.
With the parallel bus and AVR128 @ 4MHz and optimized assembler code i got 300kbytes/s with the VCP drivers and VB6.
With the UART types the bottleneck is the ucontroller inside UART hardware and software. It should be possible up to 1MBaud. I did not test this.

The FTDIchips can be programmed to:
* optimize transfer rates and timing
* use customized outputs (controlling LEDs, SPI, JTAG, ...)
* customize your board with serial numbers
* use customized VID and PID
* use customized drivers with your company names and your application name ... (easy to do)
(So if you connect the FTDI to any windows PC then it pops up: "New USB device found" with the text "bokzsamot temperature controller" for example.)

i have never seen data loss or corrupted data

In a current project we use FTDI chip with true USB2.0 transfer, and i hope to get 20MBytes/s to our FPGA.

Hope this helps
Klaus