USB to Pen Drive or Bluetooth Dongle

blackcattech · Post by **blackcattech** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:23 pm

I'm very new to USB on the PIC, not dabbled so far. I'm working on a project that needs to dump some data on to a pen drive and may in future need to talk to a smartphone via a Bluetooth dongle.

Is this something that is within the scope of a PIC18? If not, can any of the PIC range do it? I'm more familiar with PICs but others here use ARM processors.

TIA!

RangerBob · Post by **RangerBob** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:54 pm

I'm afraid native USB host (pen drives, plugging into a printer etc)on a PIC18 is out of the question. PIC32 and similar type processors can do it.

An option would be to add a dedicated USB host processor if you are determined to use a PIC18 such as the Vinculum products from FTDI. You talk to them over Serial, parallel or SPI, and they take care of the hard work such as the FAT filesystem and USB host stuff for you.

Bluetooth can be done easily using a serial bluetooth module such as this.

blackcattech · Post by **blackcattech** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 4:01 pm

Thanks, I did suspect that.

Would a PIC24 be OK or does it have to be the PIC32?

I was looking for a reason to look at the new Microchip XC compilers, I think I've just found one....

Jerry Messina · Post by **Jerry Messina** » Thu Jan 17, 2013 6:03 pm

Any of the chips that support USB OTG should work as either a device or a limited host, such as the PIC24FJ or PIC24EP series (as well as some of the PIC33 series)