USBee EX 2.0 Experimenter's Board

for USB 2.0 High Speed Development

Our USBee EX 2.0 Experimenter's Board is a tiny PCB board and is ideal for students or designer's that need to get up and running with High Speed USB immediately.  With a mini-B USB connector on one end and signal pin headers on the other, this simple board will instantly USB 2.0 High-Speed enable your design.  Then using the source code libraries, drivers and DLL's that are included you can write your own Visual Basic or C PC application to control and monitor the signal pins on the board.  It's as simple as 1,2,3. 

The USBee EX 2.0 board specifications:
Operates at USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mbps) or Full-Speed (12Mbps)
Board Size: 1.25" x 2.0"
Mini-B USB connector
14 0.025" square posts
8 Digital signal lines, 3 GND, +5V and +3.3V signals.

The USBee EX 2.0 has headers that are the interface to your circuits.  The signals on these headers represent an 8 bit data bus, a Read/Write signal and a clock line.  Using the libraries and source code provided you can do byte-wide reads and writes to these signals.

There are two modes of data transfers that you can use depending on your system needs.  The first offers complete flexibility of the 8 signal lines, while the other gives you very high transfer rates.

In the first mode, Bi-Directional Mode, each of the 8 data signals can be independently setup as inputs or outputs.  When sending data to the pod, only the lines that are specified as outputs will be driven.  When reading data from the pod, all 8 signals lines will return the actual value on the signal (whether it is an input or an output)

In the second mode, High-Speed Mode, all of the 8 data signal lines are setup in the same direction (as inputs or outputs) at the same time.  When sending data to the pod, all signals become outputs.  When reading data from the pod, all signals become inputs.

The routines used to read and write the data to the pod are the same for both modes.  You call the SetMode function to specify the mode you want to use.  All subsequent calls for data transfers will then use that mode of transfer.

This board also works with the Cypress EZ-USB FX2 Development kit software that you can download for free from Cypress Semiconductor's web site at www.cypress.com.

The USBee EX 2.0 Experimenter's Board has been proven to help in the connection of embedded designs to PC's using the USB bus, through it's simple design and interfacing software.

The following table shows the typical transfer rates for the various modes on one PC platform (2.5GHz, P4, Intel EHCI USB controller, XP Pro, High Speed USB 2.0 port)

Full Speed transfer rates on the same machine are: