Using Arduino ／ Seeeduino as serial to usb converter
As some might know there are several FTDI chip based usb to serial converter breakout boards. Sparkfun produced several of them through time , and recently Adafruit launched a new product called ”FTDI friend”. Those are the well known ones. But if you have an Arduino board with usb connectivity ( like Duemilanove ) , you don’t need to buy any of those for basic usb to serial converting tasks. If you have a Seeeduino, you are luckier!
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It’s too bad that you’re going back to the standard USB B connector and not the Mini-B connector that you used to have. I prefer the mini-B as it’s smaller and less likely to interfere with shields.
I also like Micro-B or Micro-AB but that’s a losing battle. 🙂
You are totally right, however nowadays everything is called “usb to …”
Warning useless thought ahead !
The way i was thinking about it was that usb to serial gives you all the options of serial, however it does not give you the usb options, for me a serial to usb would mean you could connect, for example, a usb audio card to it..
//END OF useless thought
Anyways, “usb-serial converter” works well
Nate
Firstly, thanks Seedstudio for publishing this.
Nate,
I guess that was an error caused when they moved the original article to this blog, but it seems fixed now.
Usb to serial and serial to usb is like “chicken or the egg?” for me : ) When you look at computer’s side you are converting usb to serial but if you look at other device’s side, you are converting serial to usb.
But maybe saying “usb-serial converter” would be more comprehensive. Thanks for advice.
hum you wrote this twice :
First some technical stuff. The Atmel chips inside the Arduino boards come with a special bootloader firmware. That allows user to program the chip without needing of any other ICSP , JTAG , etc.. programmers. That bootloader firmware uses hardware UART module of the chip. So you can program the chip with a standart RS232 cable.
And aren’t we talkin about a usb to serial and not a serial to usb ?
(don’t take this in a bad way, i read the RSS and love ur blog ^^)