Comment by em3rgent0rdr

I'm always a bit saddened to see that a separate chip is the go-to method to interface with USB. Unfortunately USB is an incredibly-complex protocol that it seems anything beyond a basic V-USB running USB 1.1 at low-speed is generally not doable without specialized hardware and a significant software stack. Meanwhile a protocol like SPI is ridiculously simple...the minimum hardware needed is a shift register that can be clocked fast enough. I miss how desktop and labtops used to have an exposed serial and parallel port, which could communicate at this low level. I often wonder if instead of USB existing that we instead stuck with UART, I2C, or SPI multidrop (using a small set of standard clock rates) for simple peripherals (maybe over a single connector like the 4-pin JST SH cable for Stemma QT, Qwiic and Grove) over a short distance, and then jumped to IEEE 802.3 Ethernet links for data-heavy peripherals like monitors and external drives. Then instead of having to have separate support for USB and Ethernet, you just would support Ethernet links.