Convert To USB

Using FTDI based Serial USB Adaptors

There are a lot of Serial USB converter devices that use the the very popular FT8U232BM FTDI chip. Here is information what drivers you might have to install and what operating systems you can use the adaptor under. First of all, conveniently, the linux kernel has drivers for the chipset and automatically assigns a com port to the device. This is in Kernels 2.6.9 or greater.

Under windows you need to add a driver for windows to recognize it as a “Virtual” com port. Virtual means that the windows driver creates the port. You also will notice that windows will match the particular adaptor to a com port and remember it. If you plug a new FTDI cable in you will get a new com port number for that cable. FTDI also has a high speed direct driver under windows that does away with some of the inefficiencies of using a virtual com port. So some devices using the FTDI chip might use this. The maximum transfer rate is 2MB per second.

There are Mac OSX drivers. The Intel version of the drivers need OSX 10.4 or later. The other drivers for windows CE, Open BSD, and QNX listed as developed by third parties. There is a newer version of the chip FT232R that does not require a crystal so it would be cheaper to manufacture in a serial cable. The newest versions of drivers account for this.

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