I started wandering about my usb ports for use with robotics. My question is, does anybody know how to read what is being sent to the usb ports? For example if I had a button connected to the positive and the input how could I go about getting a C++ program to register that it got a 1 or a 0?
It's a type of high speed serial port, you need an USB slave device like the FT245R (USB to Parallel) IC to talk to it. You cannot connect buttons directly to the data lines.
Didn't exactly mean directly but that was a rough idea of what I wanted. Was going to use some Basic stamp 2's to do some stuff with it. But I guess those wouldn't work without the FT245R chips or am I wrong?
I agree, but if you know the nature of the data you send to a VB program you do not have to interpret it in the Stamp, let the VB take care of that end and just send raw data.