FTDI Vinculum 2 (VNC2)

[westfw]

Has anyone used FTDI's Vinculum 2 (VNC2) USB host/device controller?
Ideally I want to do a USB Serial Device, and an SPI to USB Host bridge capable of supporting random devices (storage, BT, WiFi, IRDA, Sound, Keyboard, phones) (not all at once.)
It sounds like the VNC will do this, but FTDI seems to have odd standards of documentation, wants you to use their OS and firmware infrastructure, and has no discussion forums or even full reference designs that I can find...

[mikeselectricstuff]

I had a quick play with it but didn't like the IDE. Then I discovered the PIC24fjxxxGBxxx devices, which have USB host, are cheap and have USB examples with full source code. And even available in DIP.
 

[Harvs]

About 2 years ago I tried.  Still have ten of them sitting here in a bag.


The IDE, API and documentation was such an awful mess at that time that I gave up after a couple of days.  Not sure if they've put any decent effort into yet.


The bugs were just so obvious and BS that it wasn't just a newby error.  Things like the pin assignment was completely wrong (needed to assign pin 40 something to get pin 12 or 13 to function.)  Even the demo code would crash...


But... A company can do a lot in two years, and the hardware seemed to have some promise (like dual USB peripherals.)

[marshallh]

Friend of mine tried it a year or so ago for hosting a couple usb HID peripherals. Quickly he found that if you don't use the small set of precompiled examples you're in the woods.

It was pretty evident that FTDI themselves did not know anything about the actual design of the chip! For example, when using its IO to transfer serial data, the IO library did not afford any sort of reliable timing. The IO arbiter was threaded and running what seemed to be a small RISC cpu. He only got a few Kbaud throughput.

IIRC he got one part of it "working" by disassembling the supplied library/firmware and mapping out the registers used for raw I/O and banging on those instead, but at that point the downsides had already long started and he's bowed out to using a pic32 or something like that.

[westfw]

The IO arbiter was threaded and running what seemed to be a small RISC cpu. He only got a few Kbaud throughput.

Yep; that's my big worry.  Being forced to use an operating system whose performance characteristics are neither understood (by me), nor very well documented.  Without the underlying hardware being described well enough for me to "bypass" it...

[mikeselectricstuff]

When this was about to come out, I chatted to an FTDI guy at Electronica who said they'd subbed out all the devtool development to (I think) Singapore.

Unless you can use one of the FTDI pre-compiled applications ( in which case it it at least a lot cheaper than the old VNC1), I don't know if there's anything this would do that a PIC24 won't for less money with  better  documentation and more device choices.

Now if they did a USB high-speed version, that would be more interesting, although probably now too late to compete with soem ARMs like the LPC18xx from NXP.

[jerry507]

I inherited a design using one of them. Absolute garbage. The IDE was terrible and nothing seemed to work at all. I needed to write a host driver to work with a silicon labs usb-serial chip. When I read through the documentation it became painfully clear it couldn't even do what I want.

Now they sit around because I can't bring myself to trash them. But they're pretty useless.