If you must upgrade a design to include a USB connection for a Human Interface Device (HID), take a look at Silicon Labs, which now offers new bridge chips that easily provide a USB interface for UART-based devices.
Category: Eval Kits
You can use a new USB-2.0 chip and board to connect to Arduino I/O boards, or shields, to create an embedded system with many types of I/O and communication ports.
Some kits use complex MCUs that vendors document poorly, if at all. That's a shame because programmers want to do useful things, not decipher information in 1000-page data books just to make I/O ports work.
A new "branch" of TI's MSP430 MCU family runs on 0.9V and offers ROM and RAM-based versions. An analog "pool" of devices lets designers create a variety of analog peripherals.
Enter the Renesas Electronics America RX Design Contest, get a free RX62N demo kit, and compete for a $US 5000 top prize, or one of many other prizes from Renesas and its Alliance Partners.