Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
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Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#2Maybe it’s covered and I just missed it, but why disassemble the Arduino when it has perfectly serviceable serial ports?
I mean, unless for fun, which is a valid reason in the context.
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#3[dead]
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#4I'm not sure why I expected more, but I was a little disappointed.
Soldering some wires onto an FTDI chip in a pinch is great, but the chip is doing all of the work really. I was hoping to learn I could make a serial to USB with _less than_ an FTDI chip.
That said, respect for the effort of taking the photos and writing it up, and it was worth a read to learn about those naughty Scots bricking peoples devices with bad drivers.
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#5Maybe it’s covered and I just missed it, but why disassemble the Arduino when it has perfectly serviceable serial ports? I mean, unless for fun, which is a valid reason in the context.
On top of that, it's enough to assert the microcontroller's reset to then freely use the RX/TX pins from the FTDI as if it wasn't there.
Just plain insanity.
As for cp2104 usb to ttl serial, full adapters using that chip cost $2 a pop on AliExpress.
As the prices are like that, I ordered a few of every available usb-serial chip at some point. I'll be fine for a long time.
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#6Maybe it’s covered and I just missed it, but why disassemble the Arduino when it has perfectly serviceable serial ports? I mean, unless for fun, which is a valid reason in the context.
On top of that, it's enough to assert the microcontroller's reset to then freely use the RX/TX pins from the FTDI as if it wasn't there. Just plain insanity. As for cp2104 usb to ttl serial, full adapters using that chip cost $2 a pop on AliExpress. As the prices are like that, I ordered a few of every available usb-serial chip at some point. I'll be fine for a long time.
Or you know, pop the Atmega out
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#7I thought this was a fun journey through a tiny DIY tooling project, and I enjoyed it! I liked the detail level which is turned up quite high, taking care to explain many of the steps that are (typically) taken for granted by electronics hobbyists.
Still, this part stuck with me so I feel a need to comment:
The high level overview is that "serial", or UART (Universal Asynchronous Receive and Transmit) is a protocol for exchanging data between two systems over two independent wires, with each side able to transmit and receive simultaneously, without those two lines necessarily being synchronised (hence "Asynchronous" in the name).
I would argue that "asynchronous" here means that UART traffic is not explicitly clocked; there is no CLK signal to go along with the TX and RX lines for the data. This is of course because both sender and receiver have to already know and agree about the communication speed ("baud rate", which is actually just bits/second at this level) or they will get garbage.
This is in contrast to synchronous serial protocols like I2C and SPI which both have a clock signal.
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#8Maybe it’s covered and I just missed it, but why disassemble the Arduino when it has perfectly serviceable serial ports? I mean, unless for fun, which is a valid reason in the context.
On top of that, it's enough to assert the microcontroller's reset to then freely use the RX/TX pins from the FTDI as if it wasn't there. Just plain insanity. As for cp2104 usb to ttl serial, full adapters using that chip cost $2 a pop on AliExpress. As the prices are like that, I ordered a few of every available usb-serial chip at some point. I'll be fine for a long time.
Yeah I was really questioning the point of removing it from a board where it has all the connections it needs in order to then make all those connections again! It’s a very nice write up but I was just left wondering “whyyy?”
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#9Maybe it’s covered and I just missed it, but why disassemble the Arduino when it has perfectly serviceable serial ports? I mean, unless for fun, which is a valid reason in the context.
He's not using the Arduino Uno for anything useful, its just a test jig to check the cable works. He says at the start of the article that he needs a USB-UART converter to work with another project.
I'm assuming that project doesn't have its own USB-UART like an Uno.
Re: Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
#10I'm not sure why I expected more, but I was a little disappointed. Soldering some wires onto an FTDI chip in a pinch is great, but the chip is doing all of the work really. I was hoping to learn I could make a serial to USB with _less than_ an FTDI chip. That said, respect for the effort of taking the photos and writing it up, and it was worth a read to learn about those naughty Scots bricking peoples devices with ba…
>expected more
It's the field - very wide range of ability. Some are stoked about making LEDs blink and others are busy dumping and reverse engineering ROMs. Just depends on one's own journey stage. In my case article is above my level...haven't dealt with UART before