USB post

USB on the PIC32MZ

UPDATE: ERROR IN CODE FIXED

In the USB_device_description, change the line called /* bDeviceClass */ from 0x00 to 0x02 otherwise enumeration won't complete

Hello again all, he said to no one. Great news! I've finally gotten the USB port on the PIC32MZ working without Harmony. It's been a multi-year on-again-off-again project but this time I managed to get it done. Well, it works on all my development boards anyway.
What I've gotten to work so far is USB CDC (virtual COM port), which means I no longer have to use a USB-UART chip on my PIC32MZ development boards. From here I want to move on to getting HID working and then the ultimate goal of MSD. But for now, I'm uploading the CDC code and hopefully if anyone reads this they can see if it works on their boards :)

The documentation is severely lacking on USB-related stuff and to give credit where credit is due, here are all the sites I referenced when making my code:
* Microchip's own OTG datasheet
* Microchip's AN1166 on USB CDC
* The massively long USB.org CDC spec 1.2
* MARKDINGST.BLOGSPOT.COM that helped me understand the get/set line coding better
* WWW.XMOS.AI that helped me understand what the various endpoints were
* AIJU.DE that really helped explain some of the intricacies of the flags I needed to set
* WWW.BEYONDLOGIC.ORG for their simple explanataion of the USB setup packets
* WWW.SILABS.COM for a better explanation of USB-CDC

And then the big ones. Actual examples of USB-CDC for the PIC32MZ. I couldn't get either of these to work on my dev board but I used them as skeletons to base my own code off of (with a fair bit of copy and pasting!). Thanks to both of these people without whom I'd never have had any hope of getting this done:

What you will notice missing there is MPLAB Harmony, because it continues to be a bloated, slow, useless mess that is so cryptic that it is useless and provides no hints of how to do anything yourself. The Harmony approach of one library for all devices may be great for corporations who don't care about how anything works but it is atrocious for a hobbyist like me trying to understand how to use the PIC32MZ series.

Anyway, I will go into a brief explanation of USB and CDC in a future post but for now I just wanted to share the code.

Please note that while I have started splitting up the code into a few different files the work isn't done yet. I also have a lot more to learn about USB so some of the naming or things I'm doing may well be wrong :) Point is, it works on my board and I think having the code out there is better than not having it out there. As always, YMMV!

Here's the code. I hope it works on your boards and, if not, leave a comment and I'll try and help out.

Categories: pic32

Tags: code