18 Aug
2012
18 Aug
'12
8:29 p.m.
> 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 [...]
Yeah, y'know, I'm doing a bit of that myself
lately. [...]
Just how "unclean" is it to waste the
on-chip USB controller just
because of the suitly crap surrounding the Vendor IDs and stuff?
As a potential device user, I would prefer to have a serial port (on a
tiny connector if physical space is an issue - provided either you
provide a dongle to something at least pseudo-standard or I can solder
to the pads and run wires out to whatever connector I want). If you
_must_ go USB, I would _much_ rather have a USB device that looks like
a serial port, with known, reliable, stable software on the host, than
something which requires either running a vendor binary blob (which
usually won't run on what I want to talk to it with even if I were
willing to run it) or doing a bunch of driver hacking. "Unclean" can
go hang - especially if the alternative would mean increasing the
device cost to make up for having to buy a vendor ID.
If you really want your device to be useful to users (as opposed to
being useful to software license-to-use sales or some such), the only
excuse I can see for not looking like a stock serial port is if your
device wants to do something that is difficult or impossible within the
serial-port abstraction - or if there's already a standard abstraction
available for your device. (A video camera might be an example of both
of those simultaneously.)
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