The Arrival of USB I/O 24 V3 Board

This morning, the long awaited board from www. hobbyengineering.com has been delivered. I thought it is big. However, once the box is opened, its only 38X69mm only. Yet another the IC being used is FT245BL instead.

Actually the FT245BL is the lead free version of the 2nd generation of FTDI's popular USB FIFO I.C. This device not only adds extra functionality to its FT8U245AM predecessor and reduces external component count, but also maintains a high degree of pin compatibility with the original, making it easy to upgrade or cost reduce existing designs as well as increasing the potential for using the device in new application areas.

Check the device using the Dell Notebook. And this is the test program that use Microsoft Visual Basic Express Edition 2005 on Windows XP. Suppose this program is used to detect more than one USB board. However, since for the time being this is the only one, what the heck then.

The point is the board is working fine. The next stage is to explore it using Windows 98 platform since that's the one we actually plan to use. The old IBM P2 Thinkpad running WIndows 98, that's the next target.