One area I haven’t prioritized for a long time is communication between microcontrollers and computers. I’ve long used Microchip’s PIC and dsPIC series, but the same is true for Arduino, Raspberry PI, etc. In each case, I tend to try to do my debugging within the provided IPE or whatever tool is provided by the microcontroller. Within a production environment, I have typically stuck with CAN or a TCP interface. A much easier method I ‘rediscovered’ is UART which can easily be interfaced with USB. In particular, the FTDI chip such as that provided with DSD Tech’s dongle is very easy to use.
With a two wire interface (plus ground) I can now stream data from a microcontroller directly to a PC, using Python, LabView, or any method desired to obtain data directly from the microcontroller. Sending and encoding it is another matter, in which I’ll describe this setup in a future post.