I come to you today to judge your interest in my recent project, a low cost USB-GPIB adapter. I've been working on this for several months now. Its been my introduction to microcontroller programming, PCB design, and surface mount soldering. I'm very pleased with the result.
This project started when I noticed how expensive, and how restricted, the National Instruments and Agilent USB-GPIB adapters were. For Linux, they only provide drivers for Red Hat based distros. Even then, those drivers are crippled compared to the Windows driver (you are not able to use Matlab on Linux to communicate with their driver)! This was a frustration for me in the lab (I'm a physics graduate student in Canada) as I was forced to use Windows for an experiment.
During the summer on my own time, I implemented the GPIB protocol on a PIC 18F series microcontroller. Using a FTDI chip, my adapter allows one to communicate with any connected instrument using any operating system and programming language that supports serial port communication. That makes it ready to go without having to download any drivers on Linux with kernels version 2.6.31 and later!
My goal is to have a thriving business in a few years so that when I finish my graduate studies I can transition to working on it full time.