Ok... today the mail man handet me a little envelope with a bunch of great stuff:
Yes, there are two bodge wires in there... do not ask.
My experience with the chip so far:
I put the whole thing on the breadboard, shorted RX and TX and powered it from the bench supply to see if anny magic smoke will be released.
No smoke, everything went fine.
Then i connected it to the powered USB hub and to my delight it was imediately registered by my Windows 7 as a USB-Serial adapter.
No driver installation required, awesome!
Then i opend the terminal and as expected the data send was echoed by the board without problems. All hunky dory!
I paid close attention at this point, if there was anny problem with missing drivers.
None was reported.
I noticed the that the LEDs for power and sleep dit not behave as expected, i checked and i had wired them not to the default pins.
That was ment to be that way, i then remembered, the layout demandet it.
The sun is still shining!
Now for the battery charger detect feature, it is turned of by default.
And since i have to assign the right pins to the sleep and power pin, i have to get to know the configuration utillity.
The CY7C65213 product page led me to the right one, after a brief stay with google and the wrong utillity.
I installed the "USB-Serial Software Development Kit" and then there was a problem.
For one, it dit not install a menu shortcut.
The Cypress folder only contained the link to the update manager, i had to locate the binary and link it myself.
I opend the SDK and... no device found.
The board plugged into the Hub was no were to be seen.
Re-powering the board dit not help either.
Since i installed the "USB-Serial Software Development Kit" i thought everything i need should be installed.
I checked again and there was a "USB-Serial Driver Installer - Windows" listed on the downloads for the SDK.
So... download that, install this... aaaaand?
No dice, still no device found.
At this point i was a bit, disgruntled.
"There has to be a driver problem" i thought to myself and checked the device manager.
Bingo! Missing/Faulty driver for the "USB-UART LP Vendor MFG".
Ok... i just have to (re)install driver, then everything will be fine.
It was not, the driver could not be installed.
What do you do at this point?
Yes, indeed, turn it of and on again!
I closed all my windows, saved all data and prepared to reboot the computer.
After closing the last window there it was!
A little tiny promt, wich had been pushed to the last window layer, no indication on the task bar. Just a tiny promt wich said:
"Installation successfull, windows has to be restarted!" or something like that...
Yea, that should not have happend. Bad, bad SDK!
After that, the clouds lifted, the birds started singing again and the SDK worked as promised.
The CY7C65213 was re configured, the BCD enabled and set up in unter a minute.
The SDK is very self explanatory and not bloated.
A few screenshots:
http://shiosai.de/gallery3/index.php/Electronics/USB-SerialAfter enabling it, the BCD feature works as advertised.
When connected to a Charger port it reports 1.5A, when connected to the USB hub it reports 500mA, and not initialised it reports 100mA.
When only powered from the bench supply, without anny resistors or hub on the USB connector, it will say that it is in USB suspend and report 2.5mA.
I will put the board into use on a devboard and continue to use it over the next days and will write an update after that.
But for now, i am very happy with the little thing.
Pro:
3.3V compatible out of the box but requires 3.3V to be supplied by the target.
Battery charger detect.
Cheaper
Not manufactured by FTDI
In most situations fully FT232 pin compatible
Con:
My SDK installation was a bit bumpy.
A few odd configurations will not be 100% pin compatible.
I think this will be my new go-to chip for this task.