5 Compile a simple serial test program Configure the FTDI driver into the kernel cd linux-2.6.22 make menuconfig Enable the FTDI Serial Converter Driver Device Drivers ---> USB Support ---> USB Serial Converter Support ---> USB FTDI Single Port Serial Driver (EXPERIMENTAL) Exit, saving your changes make make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH.
A few weeks ago, I was working on, and I faced a rather large problem. I had to program nearly five hundred badges in a week. I needed a small programming adapter that would allow me to stab a few pads on a badge with six pogo pins, press a button, and move onto the next badge. While not true for all things in life, sometimes you need to trade quality for expediency.
This is how I built a terrible but completely functional USB to serial adapter to program hundreds of badges in just a few hours. Posted in, Tagged,. If you know where to go on the Internet, you can pick up an FTDI USB to Serial adapter for one dollar and sixty-seven cents, with free shipping worldwide. The chip on this board is an FTDI FT232RL, and costs about two dollars in quantity. This means the chips on the cheap adapters are counterfeit.
While you can buy a USB to serial adapter with a legitimate chip, Syonyk found a cheaper solution: buy the counterfeit adapters, a few genuine chips,. It’s brilliant, and an excellent display of desoldering prowess. Why is Syonyk replacing non-genuine chips with the real FTDI?, where the official FTDI driver for Windows detected non-genuine chips and set the USB PID to zero. This bricked a whole bunch of devices, and was generally regarded as a bad move. Was a variation on a theme where the FTDI driver would inject garbage data into a circuit if a non-genuine part was found.
This could also brick devices. Notwithstanding driver issues, the best reason for swapping out fake chips for real ones is the performance at higher bit rates; Syonyk is doing work at 3 Mbps, and the fake chips just don’t work that fast. To replace the counterfeit chip, Syonyk covered the pins in a nice big glob of solder, carefully heated both sides of the chip, and slid the offending chip off when everything was molten. A bit of solder braid, and the board was ready for the genuine chip. With the new chip, the cheap USB to serial adapter board works perfectly, although anyone attempting to duplicate these efforts might want to look into replacing the USB mini port with a USB micro port.
Posted in, Tagged,. Electromechanical solenoids are pretty cool devices. Move some current through an electromagnet and you can push a load around or pull it. If you’re MIT student Lining Yao, you can use them to dance.
Lining built that are both modular and modern. She even rolled her own solenoids. The one with the eye stalk is the bridge, and it’s connected to a computer over FTDI. The other nodes attach to the bridge and each other with small magnets that are designed to flip around freely to make the connections. These links are just physical, though. The nodes must also be connected with ribbon cables.
Each of the nodes is controlled by an ATtiny45 and has a MOSFET to drive the solenoid at 8-12 V. Lining snapped a small coin magnet to the end of each solenoid slug to provide a bigger surface area that acts like a tap shoe.
TapBot can be programmed with one of several pre-built tap patterns, and these can be combined to make new sequences. The curtain goes up after the break. There are other ways to make things dance, like muscle wire. That uses nitinol to dance to Duke Nukem. Posted in, Tagged,.
Despite concerted efforts to kill them, serial ports are alive and well, especially in embedded system. True, most of them end in a USB port, these days, but there’s still a lot of gear with a DE-9 (it isn’t a DB-9, despite the common use of the word) or a TTL-serial port lurking around. James Fowkes got tired of managing a bunch of USB to serial adapters, so he decided to build his own that would provide four serial ports from a USB connection. The small board has transmit and receive LEDs for each port along with EMI and ESD protection on the USB port.
The ports are all TTL serial, serving the modern hacker, and the 3.3V pins are 5V tolerant. Posted in Tagged,. When it comes to electronic hobbyists and EEs, there is no company that deserves a few raised eyebrows than FTDI. They made their name with USB converter chips, namely USB to serial chips that are still very popular today. So popular, in fact, that clones of these chips are frequently found in the $2 Arduinos from China, and other very low-cost devices.
A little more than a year ago, a few clever people noticed by setting the USB PID to 0000. The Internet reacted to this move and. The Windows driver was fixed, until the same shenanigans were found again., giving us all the first facts and figures that aren’t from people frustrated with Windows’ automatically updated drivers. The most interesting information from Fred Dart is how FTDI first found these counterfeit chips, what FTDI chips are being counterfeited, and how many different companies are copying these chips. The company first realized they were being cloned when they couldn’t reproduce results of a Chinese-made ‘FTDI’ USB to RS232 cable that behaved strangely. A sample of the cables were shipped to FTDI and after inspecting the chip inside, FTDI found it was a clone with a significantly different architecture than a genuine chip. So far, the counterfeiters appear to only be counterfeiting the SSOP version of the FT232RL and occasionally the older FT232BL chip. From what FTDI has seen, there appears to be only one or two companies counterfeiting chips.
As the CEO of FTDI, Fred has a few insights into what can be done to stop counterfeiters in China. The most important is to trademark the logo. This isn’t just the logo for a webpage, but one that can be laser etched onto the plastic package of the chip. US Customs has been very amenable to identifying counterfeit components, and this has led to several shipments being destroyed. Legal action, however, is a bit hard in China, and FTDI is dealing with a gang that counterfeits more than FTDI chips; there’s a high likelihood this gang was responsible for the fake Prolific PL23o3 chips a few years ago. As far as FTDI bricking counterfeit chips is concerned, Fred Dart wasn’t silent on the issue, he merely wasn’t asked the question and didn’t bring it up himself. Posted in Tagged,.
Just over a year ago, FTDI, manufacturers of the most popular USB to serial conversion chip on the market, released an update to their drivers that bricked FTDI clones. Copies of FTDI chips abound in the world of cheap consumer electronics, and if you’ve bought an Arduino for $3 from a random online seller from China, you probably have one of these fake chips somewhere in your personal stash of electronics. After a year, we have the latest update to FTDI gate. Instead of bricking fake chips,. Connecting a fake FTDI serial chip to a computer running the latest Windows driver will output “ NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!”, an undocumented functionality that may break some products., rendering them inoperable.
Because fakes and clones of these chips are extremely common in the supply chain, and because it’s very difficult to both tell them apart and ensure you’re getting genuine chips, this driver update had the possibility to break any device using one of these chips., FTDI backed down from their ‘intentional bricking’ stance, and Microsoft removed the driver responsible with a Windows update. Still, the potential for medical and industrial devices to fail because of a random driver update was very real. The newest functionality to the FTDI driver released through a Windows update merely injects unwanted but predictable data into the serial stream. Having a device spit out “ NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!” won’t necessarily break a device, but it is an undocumented feature that could cause some devices to behave oddly. Because no one really knows if they have genuine FTDI chips or not – this undocumented feature could cause problems in everything from industrial equipment to medical devices, and of course in Arduinos whose only purpose is to blink a LED. Right now, the only option to avoid this undocumented feature is to either use Linux or turn off Windows Update.
Since the latter isn’t really a great idea, be prepared constantly roll back the FTDI driver to a known good version. Posted in, Tagged,. If you want video support on your project, you might start from a device like a Raspberry Pi that comes with it built in. Kevinhub88 doesn’t accept such compromises, so he and his Black Mesa Labs have come up with a whole new way to add video support to devices like the Arduino and other cheap controllers. This project is called, and it can add digital video at a resolution of up to 800 by 600 pixels to any device that has a single serial output. The video is created by an, a low cost GPU from FTDI that offers a surprising amount of video oomph from a cheap, low power chip (he has demoed it running from a lemon battery), meaning that he is hoping to be able to sell the Mesa-Video for under $50.
UPDATE: KevinHub88 let us know that he didn’t actually power the device from a lemon battery, as you would need a lot of lemons to make 50mA at 5V. Apologies for any confusion! However, Mesa-Video is just the beginning. Kevinhub88 wanted to get around the problem of stacking shields on Arduinos: add more than one and you get problems. He wanted to create an interface that would be simpler, faster and more open, so he created the Mesa-Bus. This effectively wraps SPI and I2C traffic together over a simple, fast serial connection that doesn’t require much decoding.
This means that you can send power and bi-directional data over a handful of wires, and still connect multiple devices at once, swapping them out as required. You could, for instance, do your development work on a PC talking to the prototype devices over Mesa-Bus, them swap the PC out for an Arduino when you have got the first version working in your dev environment. Is the Arduino not cutting it? Because Mesa-Bus is cross-platform and open source, it is easy to swap the Arduino for a Raspberry Pi without having to change your other devices. And, because all the data is going over a simple serial connection in plain text, it is easy to debug.
It’s an ambitious project, and Kevinhub88 has a way to go: he is currently working on getting his first prototype Mesa-Bus devices up and running, and finalizing the design of the Mesa-Video. But it is an impressive start and we’ll be keeping a close eye on this work. Hopefully he can avoid that head crab problem as well because those things are as itchy as hell.
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The FTDI chip should be supported out-of-the box. Just connect the device and it will be available. The commands lsusb and dmesg tail (directly after plugging in the device) are your friends here. Serial COM Ports are addressed as /dev/tty. (hardware serial COM ports) while USB serials (like the FTDI chip) appear as /dev/ttyUSB. when they are connected. Personally I like moserial which is available in the repository.
Install it like so: sudo apt install moserial There you can configure your connection and read/write to the device.