ANT Forum

Dear all,

while I was able to get ANT running on my AVR I seem to be unable to get the same thing done on the PC (winxp) using the "black ANT USB stick" and the usb carrier from the dev-kit.

Both sticks work with the demos, however, connecting using the virtual com port driver seems to need some hidden trick.

I connect using 50000 / 57600 BAUD, respectively, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, no flow control.

I get no response whatsoever. Any hints?

Best Regards,

Peter      

Hi Peter:
As I know, the VCP chip is Silicon Labs CP2102. If you want to use another VCP chip, you need the new ANT_DLL.dll file.
regards,
Peter      

Hi,

in order to isolate the source of the error I have put together an ANT AP2 module and an FTDI USB-Serial bridge, which is actually working with my code.

Also, again, using the ANT windows library using the USB interface the mentioned USB ANT sticks do work.

So I assume there is somewhere a side effect maybe regarding a reset signal or so. With the FTDI I have connected the ANT reset pin to RTS so I can "hard" reset the module. Maybe something like this is hidden in the CP21xx setup, too.

BTW: Thanks for the hints I have received so far...

Best Regards,
Peter      

Hi there,

maybe somebody has a sketch of the electronics?

I still don't understand why it wouldn't work with VCP...

Regards,

Peter      

The USB stick uses the Silabs CP2102 USB to UART bridge, and uses the USBXpress drivers, so it will not show as a Virtual COM Port. Silabs does offer VCP drivers, but there is no support in the Windows ANT library for these (and there might be conflicts when using the two different drivers). The Mac ANT library does offer support for Silabs Mac VCP drivers, so if you really need to use VCP, you can use that as a reference to modify the Windows library to suit your needs.      

Hi Alejandra,

I have setup a clean pc (xp pro 32 bit), installed silabs vcp drivers, mapped the driver to the ant usb stick which shows up as com port.

I can open the com port, I can set the port characteristics, I can send data without error -- but I get no response.

I have the CP2102 working as bridge to some AVRs, so essentially the chip works (who would have thought <g>).

Of course I have used the ANT port characetristics (50000baud, no parity, 8 bit data, 1 stop bit, no protocol).

I would really like to use the original usb sticks instead of making my own...

Any ideas?

Best Regards,

Peter      

The development kit includes a library package that communicates with the ANT USB stick using the Silabs USBXpress drivers, so there is no need to setup communication from scratch using a com port. Is there a particular reason you need to use VCP?