This is a warning: I see “New Product Ideas” forums as “Here’s a place to go slightly wild!”.
(I’m also bored at work, but it pays the bills)
OK, now the topic of this thread will freak a lot of people out. Hear me out first.
Many of the new “big pics” in TQFP-80 packages have an external memory bus interface finally. The mega 144K versions only run at 25MHz max, while the smaller 64K versions run at 40MHz. Now, we take the 40MHz version (say, a PIC18F8680, and interface it with a Cypress SL811HS Host Slave Controller.
PIC18F8680
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcpl … e=en010325
SL811HS
http://www.cypress.com/products/datashe … E3F02A4D81
Now, the SL811HS’s acts as a memory mapped peripheral, and look here, there’s memory mapping on the PIC! The cypress chip does both master and slave mode, too, so it’s a master when connected to a network without a master, and a slave when connected to your PC.
Now, I’m personally not working on any PC peripherals right now. However, this PIC can handle the off-chip memory interface someone else wanted a year ago (to the 2MB limit), it’s a PIC doing the USB instead of a 16 bit microcontroller as the FX2 family and the EZ Host 16 bit standalone/coprocessor.
EZ Host
http://www.cypress.com/products/family. … st#tabdata
Now, all we need is some mass storage PIC code or a nice USB reader for a webcam, and we’d be set 