IoT and USB Networking

I'll be using this blog to comment on updating Belcarra's USBLAN on the PIC32 and eventually some additional vendors.

We last looked at this in 2015 with the older (pre-Harmony) libraries. It was reasonably easy to get a networking over USB driver implemented. But due to the design of the network stack, difficult to have it available in the same project as Ethernet.

 Microchip introduced a new set of libraries at that time (still pre-Harmony) that looked better. But unfortunately broke the APPIO debug support for the PIC32MX EF SK2. So I was not able to to get either the PIC32MX EF SK2 or the PIC32MZ EC SK working with usable console support to allow debugging.

 Getting back into this project this summer we found that the PIC32MZ EC SK had been replaced witeh the PIC32MZ EF SK. With the primary change being a USB2UART being added to the board to support a serial console.

 There is also a PIC32MZ EF Curiosity board that supports a USB UART click board plugged into one of the two mikro BUS sockets.

 Microchip has introduced a new set of support libraries called Harmony. It appears that the most stable is version 2. Version 3 has been released (I think 2019) but does not support as many of their evaluation boards.