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I'm looking to communicate with a circuit I have built on a breadboard. I would like to communicate using USB.
Can anyone suggest an item that I can use to accomplish this? Are their any other considerations I need to take into account? I would rather not have just stick the USB wires individually into breadboard sockets.
If you have a USB transceiver already on the breadboard and you just need to connect USB somehow, they make little breadboard adaptors like the one pictured below:
You can find these things buy Googling "USB breadboard adapter." An example is here.
If on the other hand you do not have a USB transceiver and would like to communicate with your circuit by a UART port, then you need a similar item, but with a USB to UART converter chip:
To find items like this, Google for USB FTDI Breakout board. An example is shown here. After installing the FTDI Virtual COM Port driver this type or board will show up as a COM port on your computer.
I can think of two low level ways to communicate with a circuit - digital (either something is on or off) or analog (what voltage is at specific point). To acomplish these tasks you need a microcontroller. Microcontroller is a very small computer on a chip that has means to communicate to circuit and to humans.
As i understand, you are not experienced in electronics very much, so i'd suggest an Arduino board - it's a board with microcontroller and other stuff that makes it easy to use.
There are some FTDI chips as suggested by justin, that can do digital communication too, there are loads of other microcontrollers and development boards, but arduino in general is the most friendly to beginners.
