FTDI device driver
PyFtdi aims at providing a user-space driver for modern FTDI devices, implemented in pure Python language.
Modern FTDI devices include:
FT2232H (dual port)
FT4232H (quad port)
Other FTDI devices could also been supported (including FT232* devices), although these devices are not a primary goal for PyFtdi, and therefore have not been tested with PyFtdi.
It should support the following modes:
UART/Serial USB converter, up to 12Mbps (depending on the FTDI device capability)
SPI master
JTAG master
Bitbang/GPIO support (not a primary goal)
PyFtdi should provide a pyserial compliant API, so it can be used as a drop-in module to access USB-serial converters based on FTDI devices.
PyFtdi relies on PyUSB, which itself depends on one of the following native libraries:
libusb-1.0 (recommended)
libusb-0.1 (deprecated)
openusb (not tested with pyftdi)
PyFtdi does not depend on any other native library, and only uses standard Python modules.
Python 2.6 or above is required, although PyFtdi may run on older Python releases with some or no modifications.
This project is still in an early alpha development stage.
However, PyFtdi is being forked from a closed-source software implementation that has been successfully used for over a year - including serial, spi and jtag protocols, based on top of the libftdi open source library.
libftdi is now being phased out from this closed-source project and replaced with PyFtdi, to ease maintenance and customization.
Meanwhile, PyFtdi is developed as an open-source solution.
PyFtdi is developed on Mac OS X platforms (including 64-bit kernels), and is validated on a regular basis on Linux hosts.
As it contains no native code, it should work on any platforms PyUSB and libusb support (including, but not limited to, Windows).
