laptop to micro interface (simple)...such a thing?

USB to RS232 converter

Or, a plug-in card with RS232.

Luhan

On the surface this might appear to be an easy solution (about as easy as you typed and sent it), but USB to RS232 converters come with OEM installable drivers with confusing or no interfacing APIs. Plus, if your "black box" is to become a product, it means you have to purchase, distribute and explain how to install these OEM drivers onto an end users laptop. Drivers and hardware that might not be supported by the OEM throughout the life of your product.

Thomas Magma

There are many USB-serial converter ICs which are supposed to be pretty straigtforward to use. The drivers make them appear as a serial port in your OS and the uC end is just a UART. The same ICs are used in plug-in USB-serial converter dongles and modules. I've only ever used the dongles, but I did investigate the other options a while back.

From memory, FTDI, Prolific and Silicon Labs all offer solutions. There will be others a web search ("usb uart" or "usb serial") away.

For absolute maximum ease, a USB-serial dongle is pretty much plug & play, but it is an extra bit of hardware.

If you want something integrated into the 'black box' one of the ICs would do. If you want to avoid surface-mount, something like this:

might be attractive.

Tim

What's "confusing" about a serial port? It looks like a serial port, it behaves like a serial port - if this is not what you want then explain what you *do* want.

If you want the luser to plug the thing into luser-level hardware and also have it work *then* you *do* have to provide an USB interface. "Nobody" in luserland understands serial ports anymore; "No-one" can be bothered to learn and IMO there will be enough deviancy between luser installs of windows that writing the installer and getting that to work with a reasonable low failure rate will be much more work than getting your end of USB to work (at your end at least you

*know and control* the layers of s**te that you have to burrow through).

So!?! .... Then you might get to sell "Support" and "Upgrades " also for a regular fee. Microsoft and thousands of others make USD Billions off exactly that business model (of first selling a flawed product, then charge for fixing it while introducing new flaws). So might you. It all depends on why and how badly the customer will want your box.

Remember, the *primary directive* of any successful business is to solve the

*owner's* problems. "Solving *customers* problems profitably" - as they say in business books to delude the weak - is merely a side effect from that!

FWIW, there is a basic driver for the FTDIChip series in all the recent versions of Windows...

Does the black box have any sort of interface?

Leon

I just play with electronics as a hobby, but I noticed that Spark Fun Electronics carries three different USB to UART chips and one USB to FIFO chip.

Scroll down to the bottom.

Also, if you're going to design anything new, I've been playing with USB enabled PIC's. PIC18F4550, PIC18F4455, PIC18F2550, and PIC18F2455 all have built in USB and there is PIC code that makes this look like a serial port on the PIC side (and on the PC side), which would seem to make migration of a serial port interfaced PIC design to a USB port interfaced PIC design easier on both the PIC and PC sides of things.

Jeff

--
    "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
     little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
     safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett\'s Familiar Quotations (1919)

APIs? I suppose if you don't want the virtual serial port to appear anywhere you might want some other kind of API, but otherwise you just use the ones in the OS for accessing seial ports.

So what are the solutions requiring nothing be installed? An ethernet port and Telnet? Some hideous hack where the device appears a USB Mass Storage device even though it isn't? Not very user-friendly and I expect laptops will have USB ports for longer than ethernet ports (which I could see being eliminated from some models with the increasing prevalence and speed of WiFi).

Tim

Have a look at:

there are many solutions there that use popular chips.

Don...

--
Don McKenzie
E-Mail Contact Page:               http://www.dontronics.com/e-mail.html

Micro,TTL,USB to 1.5" color LCD http://www.dontronics.com/micro-lcd.html
USB,RS232 or TTL to VGA Monitor http://www.dontronics.com/micro-vga.html
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use one of those usb-to-serial adaptor modules.

--

Bye.
   Jasen

not this one:

Worked out of the box with linux.

probably the same with any recent version of windows.

All it is is a standard usb-to-serial converter chip and a rs232 transceiver.

Bye. Jasen