THAT5173 Preamp Controller IC

[promixe]

JR, if you are asking with regards to your drum tuner I would either go with:

- FTDI chip ($2/pc UART/SPI/I2C <-> USB very easy with ready-to-use drivers from the manufacturer). This could be rapidly prototyped.
- Bluetooth (harder to develop IMO, IIRC you'd need FCC wireless approval, but then any Android or iOS (latter w/another licensing approval) would work with it).

You then could get rid of the hardware user interface and have a "black box" with USB jack and your GUI would be in any desktop or laptop computer. It wouldn't work with iPad/iPhone because they are not USB hosts. They have Bluetooth & Wi-Fi for connectivity.

[JR.]

thanx... I've bookmarked a link to them...

Still in research mode...

JR

[mediatechnology]

I don't know about the SitePlayer but the FTDI USB/Serial/SPI modules are more devolpment-oriented and based on the MicroChip parts. No reason that you couldn't develop/debug with them and then embed the hardware. IIRC FTDI licensed the drivers but they could be reverse-engineered. THAT used the FTDI module in the 1570/5171 demo board.

[promixe]

I don't think it's necessary to reverse-engineer the drivers. All you do is install them on your host and your device appears in the system as a simple COM serial port. Your application then uses it to communicate with the device as if it would through UART. It's very simple - I use it instead of JTAG to debug runtime of Xmega - I tell my compiler to route printf() command to UART and then it's almost exactly the same as debugging software in terminal. It saves tons of code/hours. But if you want a dedicated USB endpoint (that you have to write a driver for, no matter how simple it is) you could use a OTG-USB enabled uC's. Is your tuner AVR or MicroChip based?

[mediatechnology]

I don't think it's necessary to reverse-engineer the drivers. All you do is install them on your host and your device appears in the system as a simple COM serial port. Your application then uses it to communicate with the device as if it would through UART. It's very simple - I use it instead of JTAG to debug runtime of Xmega - I tell my compiler to route printf() command to UART and then it's almost exactly the same as debugging software in terminal. It saves tons of code/hours. But if you want a dedicated USB endpoint (that you have to write a driver for, no matter how simple it is) you could use a OTG-USB enabled uC's. Is your tuner AVR or MicroChip based?

That's how the FTDI/THAT 1570/5171 demo board worked. USB was made to look like a COM port within the host.

By drivers I meant the internal code in the Microchip CPU sitting between USB and SPI ports on the FTDI board.