I just found this forum, and hope you can help me out. This is my first post, so please be gentle...
I am developing a device that interfaces between a sensor and a host PC. The device will digitize the sensor signal and send it to the host running a LabVIEW VI (which I also need to develop). I'd like to use USB to transfer the data, and had some questions:
Can I use the USB as a general purpose serial bus, similar to RS232, to just dump data from the device to the host, sending a few bytes at a time?
Assuming the above is possible, what's the best way to read the data? LabVIEW has a few USB VIs, but I'm not having much success figuring them out.
The interface device has a PIC18F4550 microcontroller, which has a built-in USB controller. I'd really prefer to use USB to save space, and because the data rate could get fairly high for RS232. However I'm beginning to feel this is a fool's errand, and I should just cut my losses and go with RS232.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks - Norm Lind