One of the big reasons I made this board was to check out the CP2110 HID USB-UART IC. At $1.85 in single quantity (CP2110 from Digi-Key), it pretty much blows the ~$4.50 FT232 out of the water price-wise. Also cool is that it is HID based, and therefore doesn't actually require any drivers to communicate with it (Silicon Labs also make the $1.80 CP2104 USB-UART bridge that requires a driver and would be a more direct competitor for the FT232).

Being HID based, the CP2110 doesn't just show up as a serial port when you plug it into your computer, so I've been working on a quick and dirty C library to control it here (using hidapi). My next step will be to use that API to implement the serial ROM bootloader in the LCP824 to program it over USB. In the next hardware revision I'll probably have the reset and ISP entry pins controlled directly by a couple CP2110 GPIO pins, which will allow the programming software to reset the LPC824 into the bootloader itself.