On Wednesday, January 7, 2026 at 6:33:45 AM UTC-5 Adrian Godwin wrote: While the USB host chips are a useful method to add USB host to an existing project (I presume you're talking from the SPI devices from, I think, Dallas and possibly FTDI) there are now a bunch of accessible processors with USB host on-board. I think ST do some though I generally find their products hard to get started in. The ones I'd look to for easier out-of-the-box functionality and a smaller (and hence shorter learning curve) are from Raspberry pi. The Pico offers host mode USB but does require, I think, collecting some drivers. There's a tutorial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOD-NOzgj7o. There's also the very small raspberry pi zeros - A full-on linux environment with integrated USB hosts and all the onboard tools you'd expect from a desktop.
We live in an amazing age ;-) Not to go too far off topic, but another clock project I built uses vintage LTP-305 5x7 led matrix displays driven by a Pi Zero 2W... The Pi OS is a minimal headless linux environment that makes it silly easy to grab NTP time from a WiFi network for an always accurate clock. I used a no longer available Pimoroni MicoDot PHat <https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us/products/microdot-phat> display board and mounted the whole thing in a 3D printed case. Power is provided via usb from a convenient port built into one of my pc monitors... The Pi's are great for more complex projects that benefit from an operating system and also offer some GPIO / I2C / SPI ports. But the hardware microcontrollers ala Atmel/Arduino/ESP32 etc provide a lower level hardware access that is often needed to drive other devices. [image: LED_CLOCK.jpg] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/cda0d6be-8d8e-4c59-b7b2-49d952255a9bn%40googlegroups.com.
