Since my brief journey to controlling LCD display directly with ATtiny2313 I purchased a display with Hitachi HD44780 compatible driver chip. The web is already pretty full of LCD tutorials and libraries, but most seemed to either skip details and rely on external libraries, or were just overly complex. So I decided it wouldn’t hurt to share the rather short (and functionally limited) versions I came up with.

8-bit mode

In 8-bit mode, you will be needing 8 pins for sending or reading a whole byte of data at once, and 3 control lines: enable (EN), register select (RS), and read/write (RW). Basic procedure is to prepare all other lines, and then pulse the enable line high for a short while in which LCD reads your command (when RW is low) or writes data (when RW is high). For control messages, RS line is low, and for writing letters, RS line is high.

I started with ATtiny2313 and used the 8 pins in port B as LCD data lines, and PD4, PD5, and PD6 as RW, RS, and EN, respectively. With such a setup, working write command became:

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Wow, my AVR ATtiny USB tutorial here I got featured in Hack a Day! Motivated by the influx of readers, I decided to find out how to make a USB HID (human interface device) mouse.

V-USB examples already contain an example of this, so I digged in to see what is different in usbconfig.h compared to the one we finished in my tutorial. It seems only a few things need changing:

1. USB_CFG_HAVE_INTRIN_ENDPOINT needs to be set to have an additional endpoint
2. USB_CFG_INTR_POLL_INTERVAL set to 100 ms instead of 10 in template
3. USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_WRITE is not needed, nor is …FN_READ (define both to 0)
4. Device ID and name need to be changed. I’ll just use the same ID as they did
5. USB_CFG_DEVICE_CLASS is set to 0, not 0xff
6. USB_CFG_INTERFACE_CLASS set to 3 instead of 0
7. USB_CFG_HID_REPORT_DESCRIPTOR_LENGTH defined to match the structure’s length

That’s it! So here are the defines I changed:

#define USB_CFG_HAVE_INTRIN_ENDPOINT    1
#define USB_CFG_INTR_POLL_INTERVAL      100
#define USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_WRITE      0
#define USB_CFG_IMPLEMENT_FN_READ       0
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_ID               0xe8, 0x03
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_NAME     'M', 'o', 'u', 's', 'e'
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_NAME_LEN 5
#define USB_CFG_DEVICE_CLASS        0
#define USB_CFG_INTERFACE_CLASS     3
#define USB_CFG_HID_REPORT_DESCRIPTOR_LENGTH    52

OK. So what about main.c? Turns out the changes are rather straightforward:

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My local electronics shop Partco (arguably the best in Finland) had a great offer on 6-digit LCD displays. For 1€ a piece, I immediately bought one:

Once I had my hands on it, the reason for such a low price became apparent: There was no controller chip, only 50 pins and the knowledge that pin 1 was “common cathode” and the rest were for the segments. So I decided to see if I could get it work directly without a controller. And succeeded, read on to learn how!

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All right. Now that we got the basic USB code working in part 3, it’s time to wrap things up in this tutorial series. This fourth section will explain how to send data from your device to PC and also the other way around. I may later do a fifth part on how to make a USB HID device like a keyboard or mouse, so if you haven’t already, I’d recommend subscribing to the RSS feed to get updates.

Sending data from device to PC

If you look carefully at our command-line client code, you probably noticed that the control messages sent to toggle the led are of type USB_ENDPOINT_IN and we have a 256-byte buffer in place to receive any data the device sends. So far we have not received any data and the return value stored in nBytes has been zero. Let’s change that.

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This is the third part of my USB tutorial for ATtiny2313 and V-USB library. In the second part we got the breadboard setup more or less covered, and now is the time for actual code! This will most likely be the longest of the three parts, so let’s get started.

Adding V-USB as a part of your project

First, we will download the latest version V-USB library from OBdev. Head to the Downloads-section and get the latest .zip – I got vusb-20120109.zip.

Unzip the archive and copy the usbdrv subfolder to your project folder (the whole folder, not just contents). Go to the subfolder and make a copy of usbconfig-prototype.h with the name usbconfig.h. Locate the #define lines for IO port and port bits and clock rate, and update them as necessary to reflect our configuration where D+ is in PD2 and D- in PD3 and clock rate is 12 MHz:

#define USB_CFG_IOPORTNAME      D
#define USB_CFG_DMINUS_BIT      3
#define USB_CFG_DPLUS_BIT       2
#define USB_CFG_CLOCK_KHZ       12000

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This is the second part of my USB tutorial for ATtiny2313 and V-USB library. In the first part we learned how to get 3.3V from USB to power our circuits. In this part, we will expand our setup with following parts:

• Larger breadboard and additional jumper wires
• ATtiny2313
• 12 MHz crystal oscillator
• Two 27 pF ceramic capacitors to stabilize the crystal
• Two 68 Ω resistors between USB data lines and the microcontroller pins
• 1 MΩ pullup resistor for D+ and 1.5 kΩ pullup for D-
• 6-pin header for programming the ATtiny and 4.7 kΩ pullup for reset pin

Update: Some people have noted that the setup I’m using here runs ATtiny2313 at 12 MHz with only 3.3V VCC, which is outside the specified range (frequencies over 10 Mhz require 4.5V or more). I’ve never had any problems, and many others have succeeded with this setup, but if you encounter persistent problems, I suggest you to power the ATtiny2313 straight from 5V of the USB line and use zener diodes on D+ and D- lines to drop their voltage, as is done in my later tutorial with the ATtiny85 microcontroller.

Breadboard setup

This time I will not walk you through every connection. Instead, I’ll just outline the steps needed and show the pictures of end result. Here is the schematic we’re building:

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