Hey all, I got a pretty straight forward question that hopefully wont be too complicated to answer.
I want to make/buy a device that will virtually be a wireless USB connection. One end i plug in my USB device, other end I plug into my PC. It needs to be wireless up to 100+ ft.
I don't know if there is something out there they can be bought or modded to do this. I was looking through a mouser catalog and found a USB to serial device and thought I could hook that up to an xbee and have it output to another xbee with another converter. Sounds good in my head but have no idea if it will actually work.
I read that thread but you got off topic and started talking about making it specifically for that camera and my needs are less and my price range is much higher. It's for a college organization (automotive engineering group) and I'm a EE trying to help them out a little.
I hear ya. Time is money. To make it work universally with Arduino might take 100+ hours of time developing. You'd have to put the Xbee code on both sides in the middle of the USB Host stack. This is much cheaper:
If you want it to work for all hardware, your needs are much higher than mine. The timing of the Xbee is 2 orders of magnitude higher than the maximum allowed by the USB spec, even at close range.
indeed
I started with an Arduino talking over USB
disconnect the USB cable
plug into 1st Wixel
pop 2nd Wixel onto Wixel shield
pop that onto the Arduino
contiune as if nothing had happened
It's for a device that hooks up to an engine and reads data in such as intake air temp, fuel/air ratio and hooks up via usb and a program displays it all. They want it so it they can read the data while not in the car. It's a bunch of mechanical engineers trying to do EE stuff and they asked me (EE student) to help them out. I don't know what kind of data is actually sent though. If I get a USB to serial adapter, could I then put that info into an XBEE read it out on another arduino and output serial to a computer and display it like that? I think that would work, but I also think they need to write to the computer on the car.
I'm just thinking out loud here and seeing if anyone can make sense of my mess.
I really don't think it will work for you. Unless your device is 1-way only, like a NMEA GPS. 99.9% of all USB devices demand that the timing and the speed meets the USB specs. It may work for me! Because I already know it does over 300m at a super slow speed. I'll let you know how my experiment goes. You can try my simple code with your device. You should consider an off-the-shelf USB over IP device like I mentioned above. I worked on EEC-IV for 10 years at Ford...
I'd put money on it not being native USB. If it's some form of OBD then it's probably going to be easier to send the data as serial. There are Bluetooth adaptors for in car diagnostic systems. If it's an aftermarket ECU I think most have them have a serial port this would be relatively simple to connect to an xbee etc.
Have you considered using something like TCP-Com? Or even writing an ad-hoc "tcp to UART o 1 wire" bridge? The idea would be to use a server accepting connections on a computer connected to an arduino on the USB. The client would be sending what ever comes on the TCP connection to the arduino, and whatever the arduino sends over the UART to the TCP connection.
In the arduino, you can always send data wirelessly using a simple transceiver using virtualWire
or even using hopeRF modules. I think it is something simple and cost effective.
The main limitation: only one client and you will have to define a micro protocol to get information from the remote device.
Tcp over Com, try tcp-com. The other option is easier since you will not need any ip stack on the embedded side. You may find something similar to what I was describing as: tcp to serial proxy.