The one that Rabbit sells is an Easysync US232B and works completely transparently, it uses the FTDI chipset and has a 1 meter cable attached to it.
I went through the same grief a while ago when I needed to use my laptop to do some development and none of the 5 or 6 USB to Serial converters we had in-house worked, I gave in and just ordered the one Rabbit offered and it worked without any problems.
Bob
From:
r...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:r...@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of Mike van Meeteren
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005
9:56 AM
To:
r...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [rabbit-semi]
USB-to-Serial adapter
At 06:55 AM 4/28/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>There are three common chips used for
USB->Serial adapters. I don't
>remember which ones they are off the top of my
head (I'll see if I can find
>my notes at work) but only one of them works
good.
OK when I did testing last fall, this is what I
discovered.
(Note: this cable is used for our field update
utility, which only uses
TX/RX and GND, no hardware
handshaking).
Three chipsets are prevalent:
Prolific PL2303
Cypress HID->COM
FTDI
I only found two of the three chipsets in the
units that I tested. One was
the I/O Gear unit which was available at Best Buy
at the time. It uses the
Prolific chipset. It worked flawlessly with
all the testing we did. We
also ended up finding the Bytec BT-DB925 adapter,
which also uses the
Prolific chipset, and was also trouble
free.
The other one we used was the PCH cable I
mentioned in a previous
e-mail. My recall was incorrect, this is not
the cable we use. It uses
the Cypress
HID->COM driver and it never worked right. Once in a while
you'd get data to come across it, but it was
flaky
and very slow. I don't
recommend this cable.
The FTDI chipset I have no experience with, but
since Rabbit recommends it,
I would guess it works correctly.
The one we order now for our field update kit
comes from Ateck. The nice
thing is it's ultra cheap, and has a 6ft cable
attached, which makes it
convenient because you don't need a DB9-DB9
serial
cable to reach the
device (like you do with the I/O Gear unit which
is 6" long).
I have run Dynamic C using this adapter. I
just ended up having to disable
the CPU ID verify, and everything worked
fine.
-Mike
http://www.ateck.com/viewItem.asp?idProductE3057041