[Flashforth-devel] Using serialcdc.inf with Windows 10

[Conrado S. <con...@gm...>]

Hi guys,

Is anyone running ff-shell or a terminal emulator on Windows 10 to interface to a PIC18F running the console over the USB port ? How did you get it to work ? 

I’m using FF on a PIC18F2455 to control a led matrix display that interfaces over the serial port to a measurement instrument. The Forth console is implemented on the USB port of the PIC. I’m using two background tasks and things work very nicely. Congrats to all people involved in this amazing piece of code.

What I would like to do is use the USB console as a ‘service’ port for the instrument. I’ve implemented and tested the functionality and it works as intended. In our team we only use Linux and Mac OSX and interfacing to with the PIC over USB using a terminal emulator (picocom) worked pretty well. However, the end users will probably run Windows.

I’ve tried connecting the PIC to a Windows 10 machine but it wasn’t recognised. I applied for a VID/PID using the Microchip sub-licensing program, changed the corresponding values in the ASM source code and also in the serialcdc.inf file and tried to install it in Windows, only to get a “The third party INF does not contain digital signature information” error (which is true). 

I’m not familiar with Windows and a two-hour google session on self-signing inf files didn’t result in me getting any smarter. Searching for how to disable signature checking in Windows 10 didn’t bring me any further either.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.