[Elecraft] How 'bout a USB interface?

[Jessie Oberreuter]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Bill Coleman wrote:

> The whole point is that USB provides the infrastructure for creating just 
> these kind of driver interfaces.

     The USB interfaces we've been seeing are almost universally based on
existing chipsets that we already have drivers for.  From the OS
perspective, your USB serial adaptor likely still looks like a 16550 UART
-- albeit one with its own unique PCI address space and interrupt vector.
When it comes to talking to radios, we don't have anything anywhere near
standard enough to code or fabricate a chip against. Were Elecraft to go
USB at this time, they would most likely want to export the existing
serial interface.  Nothing else is going to be useful to actual users.
     If you really want to see something tailored to rig control, you're
going to have to come up with a decent spec, implement adaptor devices for
existing rigs, write drivers for Windows at minimum, provide a kick-ass
software application to go with it, and pray that the public will like it
enough to support it.  I don't actually see this as an impossible task: if
you created such a standard and sold adaptors for most of the YaeComWood
rigs, I'd cut code against it!  It is, however, well outside of Elecraft's
charter.