Well, our project needs more than two USB ports, and we were looking
at the model A anyway, so maybe I should just find some nice USB hub
chip and/or PIC that uses SPI and has a good stable driver and hook
it up via the Pi's SPI interface? I know that sounds kinda stupid
when it already has the USB interface on it, but if it's an unstable
thing, it may be good since we're going to be moving big telescopes
around with these things and it would be bad if it suddenly whacked
somebody in the head because of a bad USB message. :)
I would trust SPI over USB, especially as you have more "direct" control
over SPI than USB. But if you only have USB, then perhaps you should
use a different device than the RPI? Like a BeagleBoneBlack? Or some
other tiny Linux machine, there are a lot of them under 100 USD these
days.
Thanks for the advice! I'm going to focus on perfecting my driver for
the moment and starting the work of talking to SPI devices with it and
making sure that all is good. My brother and I were originally thinking
of going SPI to our peripherals, but the issues of distance (electrical
noise & capacitance) was seeming increasingly daunting until I
discovered cheap USB-to-SPI bridges like this one (under $2, but no
I2C). So I'm glad we're taking this approach now since there are so many
cheap Linux devices with USB.
But back to the MCP2210 driver its self, once I get this a little more
perfected, I'll submit it to linux-usb for RFC and start the gradual
process of making it fit for integration in the mainline.
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