18 Aug
2012
18 Aug
'12
5:18 p.m.
On 08/18/2012 06:43 PM, David Riley wrote:
For what it's worth, at work, I've taken to
putting an FT232 (or 2232
or 4232, depending on how many ports) on new boards instead of real
RS232 for the simple reason that our clients have a hard time finding
PCs with serial ports and are too clueless to buy proper serial
adaptors. Plus, a mini-USB port takes up a lot less room on the panel
than one DE9 (let alone four), and the chips generally cost about the
same as a decent RS232 level converter.
Yeah, y'know, I'm doing a bit of that myself lately. I feel awfully
silly putting an FT232 on a board connecting it to a pair of UART pins
on a microcontroller that already HAS a damn USB controller, but the
FTDI drivers are available for lots of platforms, and they work well,
and the USB VID/PID situation sucks. Do you have any thoughts here?
Just how "unclean" is it to waste the on-chip USB controller just
because of the suitly crap surrounding the Vendor IDs and stuff?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA