Hi! as an introductory work to FTDI chips, I wanted to work on a game controller project (or keyboard, as long as I make something work!) using an AVR chip and a FT260 as the USB bridge.

My plan was to use UART from the AVR to write ASCII characters to the FT260, which in turn would send those to the host PC to be perceived like key presses. I must admit I am lost, I am not sure where to start, but I will ask the questions I think are the most important:

1. FT260 has GPIOs, plus Ive seen dev boards for it, it looks like its meant to be used as an MCU by itself. I bought mine from Digikey and never used them, do they have the required firmware to act as a UART-USB bridge from their factory state? Do I need to program the virgin chips? If yes, with what? I do not have a programmer for them, nor IDE, nor codebase! Otherwise, I would just design a PCB that connects the AVR's UART to the FT260 and to a usb connector and hopefully when I plug it in, the computer will display HID device detected.

2. If I do not need to program the FT260 and can use my AVR with it right away, how do I set up my chip to act as a keyboard, or game controller? Is there a code example I could refer to?

3. Do I have to do anything from the PC side? Or once the firmware and PCB is complete, I can just plug it in and the device will work as expected (game controller or keyboard, depending on what I choose to implement)

Thanks a lot for your support...