UBW Firmware C Documentation
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General
If you have a UBW board with firmware C loaded onto it, then this page is for you. Firmware C is a very simple application that started as the Microchip CDC demo code (virtual serial port). I modified it to run on the UBW hardware, and to take data from the USB and output it on Port B. This is the most basic firmware build.

How It Works
For Windows PCs, the first time you plug in a UBW with firmware C, it will ask you for an .inf file. You need to use tell it to use this .inf file. Then Windows will create a virtual serial (COM) port for the UBW. You can find out which COM port was assigned to the UBW by going into the device manager (Start->Settings->Control Panel->System, Hardware tab, Device Manager button) and looking under "Ports (COM & LPT)". For Macs and Linux boxes, there are other ways to discover which serial port the UBW is listed under - when I figure those out I'll put them up here.

So now you have a UBW that appears as a serial port. You can use any language you want (I recommend Liberty Basic) to write a little program to output bytes to that serial port. Or you could use Hyperterm (comes with Windows) just to see if it works. Each byte that you send will appear on pins B7 through B0 on the UBW. You can plug in your UBW to a bread board and put some LEDs on port B to see it work.

Update (07/17/06)
A new version of Fimrware C (version 1.0) is now released. The only major change is that every time you send a byte to the UBW, it will read Port A (they are all inputs in Firmware C) and send you the value of the port back. So every time you send a byte, you'll get a byte. You can ignore them if you want, but if you need some simple inputs they can be very useful.

Update (08/11/06)
A slightly modified version of Firmware C v1.0 has been released. It is identical to version 1.0 except that when you write a byte to Port B, all of the bits' positions are reversed. In other words, Port B pin 0 is now the highest bit in the byte you send it, Port B pin 7 is the lowest bit you send it, etc. This was made for Bruce's Bits To Bytes class because of existing hardware requirements. You can download the special HEX file here. (right click on the link and do save-as to get the HEX file.)

Files:
You can download the project files, sorce code, and HEX files here.

Notes
Questions? E-mail me at my e-mail address
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