Cheapest way to add USB and 5 V and 3.3V power to a RS232 PIC project

Cheapest way to add USB and 5 V and 3.3V power to a RS232 PIC project Got some ebay USB To RS232 TTL PL2303HX Auto Converter Module Converter Adapter for arduino ebay object: 360750555245

Module has 5V and 3.3 V out (from the USB power). The PL2303 works 100% OK with Linux native drivers. Just connect to RS232 in and RS232 out, and power, and no need to write USB code, or get a special PIC, or bother about licenses, or maxmin^h^him chips. and all that at only 99 dollar cents a piece. I just build one into an existing RS232 project, simplifies a lot of things. Any terminal program or script can talk to it.

It is also a lot cheaper than external USB to RS232 adaptors (wut hte same chip!), just solder the pins into your board.

# lsusb Bus 005 Device 006: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port

PS it has a red LED too, to show USB is connected.

I've been told that PL2303 will not work with windows 8 and probably latter very soon (Win8 was a dog0

Is it a true Prolific PL2303, or one of the Chinese clones that often do not work right?

It says "RS232 TTL" - kinda confusing terminology.

True RS232 has higher voltages than TTL and the "sense" is inverted.

Is this true RS-232, or RS-232-like with TTL voltage levels, or the non-inverted TTL/CMOS that you get directly from a PIC or Arduino pin?

On a sunny day (Tue, 15 Apr 2014 10:23:15 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@coop.radagast.org (David Platt) wrote in :

I dunno, can you tell the difference? It works OK, and that is what counts.

Not if you have been designing that stuff, logic level means _after_ the inverting MAX232 so to speak. So by default the out and in are high, and can be directly connected to the UART in the chip. Tx on input and Rx to output ;-)

I have not tried the extreme baudrates yet, lemme try one, local loopback, Tx connected to Rx on the module: panteltje12: ~ # ptlrc -d /dev/ttyUSB1 -b 460800 Panteltje ptlrc-0.7 using device /dev/ttyUSB1 Escape exits. sdasdaasdas

The windows driver is buggy. Works on some things, not everything. Pretty much I use FTDI these days.

Of course the FTDI I get could be Chinese copies. ;-)