USB2SERIAL

A short tutorial on building a Graphical User interface (GUI) Serial communication program using C# and Dotnet framework .The C# program is then used for communicating with an Arduino Uno /Microcontroller (ATMEL AVR,Mirochip PIC,MSP430) to send and receive data from Windows OS.You can use the opensource code to develop your own C# based serial control program.

In this tutorial we will interface a 7 Segment LED display serially using FT232 USB to serial converter chip and D2XX library from FTDI.D2XX is a library released by FTDI international,makers of FT232 and other FT series chip to access the advanced functions of the FT232 chip.The control program is written in standard C using D2XX library and is compiled using opensource GCC compiler on a windows 7 machine.Please note that this tutorial is specific to FT232 chip and will not work with USB to serial converter chips manufactured by other companies( like TUSB3410 from TI).

This article was featured on  ,You can read the article on hackaday here.

And finally ,after all those lecturing (for those who had the patience to go through all those previous articles ) about the IDE's,setting up a connection and so on, we have reached where the real action is.In this section we are going to convert the pins of the FT232 (TXD,RXD,RTS,DTS...RI) to an 8 bit parallel port using the good old D2XX library.One use of Asynchronous Bit bang mode is the replacement of legacy parallel port based devices using FT232 chip.

In this article we will learn to use the D2XX library from FTDI to extend the functionalities of FT232 USB to Serial Converter chip.Most of the people in the embedded field are familiar about the easy to use USB to Serial converter chip FT232 which can easly add a USB Serial port to any microcontroller with an UART.With a  little bit of code and a library (D2XX) from FTDI (makers of FT232) you can easily convert the humble chip into a USB to Parallel converter (8 and 4 bit),USB to RS485 Converter and off course USB to Serial Converter.

Even though this article is written as a companion guide to the USB2SERIAL Converter sold at this website, you can use any FT232 based USB to serial converter board to test the examples present in this article. The only requirement for your hardware module is that you should be able to identify the required pins of FT232 from your board and use it.