Belcarra USBLAN for Microchip PIC32 Networking over USB Demonstration

November 2019 Update

NOW AVAILABLE - High Speed USBLAN PIC32MZ Implementation

https://github.com/Belcarra/pic32mz_usblan_harmony3_demo

Overview

The Microchip PIC32 allows for implementation of a Full Speed USB device.

Implementing a Networking over USB solution allows a PIC32 based design to connect to a Microsoft Windows system and use TCP/IP network connections using the Belcarra Windows USBLAN Class driver.

Microchip makes available a TCP/IP stack and a demonstration application that implements a Web Server. In their demo the Web Server can be accessed via the Ethernet.

Belcarra has created a Networking over USB driver (USBLAN Function Driver) for Microchip that allows the TCP/IP stack to use USB to connect to a Windows system.  A demonstration kit is available to demonstrate this capability.

This demonstration kit is adapted from Microchips Ethernet implementation of  a web server demo. The Belcarra kit uses the v2.9a version of USB from Microchip and has been implemented with the most recent production version v5.42 of the Microchip TCP/IP stack. Belcarra can also on request make available a version of this demo using the Microchip version v6 Beta TCP/IP stack.

Belcarra’s implementation of Networking over USB for the Microchip PIC32 is a very low cost networking solution for PIC32 projects, eliminating the need to add an Ethernet chip while using less Flash and RAM resources.

Demonstration Kit  [Updated April 4, 2015]

There are three hex project files

Installing USBLAN for Windows Demo on Windows 8

Belcarra’s evaluation version of USBLAN for Windows is not available directly from Windows Update for a Windows 8 user at this time, but it can be installed locally as described here.

• Download a PowerPoint Presentation, 
• Download a copy of the Microsoft-signed Belcarra USBLAN for Windows Evaluation driver kit.

First make sure your device is not connected to the PC. This is an optional procedure, but the following instruction screens make that assumption.

Next, run the Desktop

USB TestDrive - Panda

Introduction

For some time now Belcarra has made available a USB test package system for the Gumstix Overo Earth and related boards. This package is ultimately based on the Angstrom system.

The goal of Testdrive Panda (updated 2013-12-13) is to extend the project to newer systems using the TI Pandaboard. The decision was made to use Ubuntu instead of Angstrom because it’s possible to put a complete development system on board the distribution -- so if you want to test with an additional tool -- just load it on the board either with the package manager or in the worst case build it from source, all on the board, no cross-compilation needed.

However, another goal of the effort was to make this mostly unnecessary. For example, the standard network performance tool iperf is not part of the Ubuntu distro that we used, but we added a source for iperf to the package manager’s source list.

In addition to this, we customized the distro (download here) to use a more recent Linux kernel  with a customized configuration streamlined for USB testing.

Acquiring and Installing TestDrive-Panda