Well in the last post I told you about a software usb to serial solution. Well screw that it didn’t work. The software stack uses low speed bulk transfers, which no longer seem to be supported by linux or osx. So I fired up protel and built a hardware solution based on the silicon labs CP2104. The board was easy to paste up and reflow with my hot air rework tool. It worked straight away. I spent more time figuring out the software configuration for the tx rx leds, and installing the device drivers than it took to assemble the board… Go figure. Next post I’ll show you what this was used for. ciao for niao.
http://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/TechnicalDocs/cp2104.pdf
There’s a simple patch for Linux kernels apparently that’ll fix this — they recently made the USB checks more stringent.
http://spiffie.org/kits/usb7/driver_linux.shtml
Google for ‘patch for low-speed bulk transfers’ for info on possible Windows driver fixes too.