Thanks to everyone for their replies!
I have seen MicroChip's USB PIC in searching, but have yet to look further into it as a possibilty...I will defantly look it over carefully it before I plunge in to this project though.
As for the Cypress chips - I have found example firmware and software to interface the chip with the standard HID driver in Windows and a programmer using the parallel port that I think I will try to use before dropping $99 on the programmer Cypress offers (which I'm still not sure if it will work with more than Cypress's chips.)
For anyone interested here is what I came up with:
**broken link removed** - Cypress used to offer a USB Thermometer development kit using the CY7C63001 chip...complete with the programmer mentioned earler...of course now they don't offer this kit, but when they did offer this kit they didn't provide source for the windows drivers. It seems lots of people created their own and even went as far as making it compatable with the HID drivers that are part of Windows. I found HIDDemo2 on this page -
**broken link removed** - Looks like all of the dirty work I would need for USB done for me. (I haven't looked at either part of the code...it's 3am here I doubt I'd understand any of it
)
The first site also led to a homebrew programmer for the CY7C63001. It was created by X. Fenard and published in the French magazine 'Electronique Pratique.' Pitty I can't read French, but the schematic is here -
**broken link removed** - and a picture of the completed programmer and the executable is on Fenard's site at -
**broken link removed**
Now I need to build the programmer......Couple of questions here - I understand the resistors like #ohm and #kohm (so on) but what is a 4k7? And what wattage should the resistors be?
Also, will a black-light flourescent bulb provide enough UV to erase the chip? May sound like a stupid question, but I'm good at asking stupid questions.
Sorry if it seems like I shot down anyone's ideas, but I got lucky searching right after I started this thread. I knew that USB would be a bad choice for getting started with microcontrollers (and electronics in general, which I am still quite novice with.) but I wanted to create a device that communicated via USB and my perspective was that if I don't start with a project I'm truely interested in I'll get get bored quickly and forget about it...Idealy this project will be a controller for a carpc....Switching relays, detecting button presses, basically simple beginner stuff. After that the amount of electronics in the car to interface with are endless...