Controlling USB connections to an embedded system can be a real pain. Fortunately many suppliers also ship their product with an BSP. I’ve made some adjustments to one of the examples to enable communication between the device and an C++ program.

Using Microchip’s framework by using IDE: Visual C++, MPlab (the worst IDE ever), you can recompile the code for your embedded device. Flash the device and pray it works.

The board I’m using is a home-brew board, which cannot cope with most of Microchip’s firmware shipped in the BSP, ports are differently wired. Moreover previous coders have made quite a mess of the old- deprecated firmware, rewrite or upgrade to a newer version was almost impossible. So I’ve decided to start all over again. After quite some time I got it to work.

As prove, I made an clip to show the toggle process:

Required software/ links:

Microchip USB framework (firmware itself);

C18 compiler (preferred by my professor, student freeware);

MPlab 8.10 (IDE firmware embedded device);

Framework guide (very useful);

Site about Framework (useful);

Visual C++ Express (used by Microchip, all lib links are already made);

Windows DDK (compiling pc software);

Windows SDK (for future JNI);

Java JDK (for future JNI);