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“I’m now going to eat my words from when I made my first USB Morse code key. I said that using a microcontroller was overkill. The usb-serial cable worked well enough, but it had a couple of major problems: inconvenience and total lack of portability. Can you believe that the cheap cable required a driver to work on windows? And always having to run a python script couldn’t be less convenient, not to mention it took up 10%-ish of your CPU when left running in the background. I used it for a while, but when I got a new laptop I just couldn’t be bothered to set it up again. I’d been wanting to make something with USB for a while anyway. I spent a few hours reading through the USB specification but I just couldn’t cope. I was planning on bit-banging it in assembler. Finally I gave up, bit the bullet, and used the V-USB library. This, once I finally got it to compile, was shockingly easy to use. The disappointing part is I still don’t really understand USB at all.”

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