I am trying to put together a small hot plug type backplane system for a project that I am working on and got the idea to use a USB bus for insertion and removal signaling. My idea is to place a USB interface on each option card that will plug in and use that to access a small amount of flash memory form the system controller.
This would get me a two things:
1) Notification of when an option card is interested and removed.2) The ability to store a small amount of data on each option card that describes that cards features to the master controller (a Windows based PC) will know what features it has and how to talk to it.
Know, I know that I could use a few cheap USB flash drives for this but the problem is that they all show up in Windows as a separate disk drive and that limits me to the maximum number of devices that my buss can hold. That and I don't really need a file system, just a way to talk to a small amount of flash and read a few bytes of memory.
What I am really looking for is a device that acts sort of like those USB hardware keys that secure software like:
Does anyone have any leads to somewhere where I could locate a device like this?
-- Ray Buffalo, NY