Largely, yes! The biggest problem was in meeting the price limit. The limit of £35 would have been easy to meet if I had opted to use
surface mount devices but that would have severely limited the number of people who could build the interface. I opted to use a
ready built USB module that plugged into a standard 40 pin socket and this item cost £25 ($25.00 in the US!!!) leaving £10 for
the remainder of the components. The PIC and crystal cost £4.10 leaving just under £6.00 for assorted resistors, capacitors,
sockets and strip board. Most of the required components I already had in stock, but if I had to take account of
postal/delivery charges I would have failed to meet the objective (by about £3-£4). Had I been designing a serial device the
cost for the interface would have been in the order of £10-£12 as the PIC chip has a hardware serial capability built in.
However, I wanted a solution that would transfer data faster than is generally possible with a serial interface. The module
utilised transfers data at up to 300Kbytes per second.
If the cost in terms of the time spent in developing the software for the interface were to be considered then this product would be totally non-viable,
I would hate to calculate the cost but it would run into hundreds if not thousands of pounds. But then again, it was never intended to
be produced as a commercially viable product, it was meant to be a 'hobby' design, the details of which would be published on my web site
so that anyone could use the design in a non-commercial manner free of charge. The PC and PIC code were also to be free of charge whilst
I retained copyright for all of the code. At this time I will only be making the PIC Hex code available together with the PC
executable. If any user REALLY needs the source code then he/she will have to convince me that I should make it
available; that might be difficult to do.
All of the other aims were met.