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USB to Serial Chips

J

Joe G \(Home\)

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi All,

For the USB to Serial IC's - eg from FTDI and Silicon Labs.

Do the Silicon Labs and FTDI chips auto enumerate with Windows XP as a HID
Serial device.

IE - The driver is already in XP and no extra driver software required?

How about other USB to serial IC's.



Thanks in Advance?


Regards
JG
 
I believe the driver is available for download on ftdi's site. One of
the things that got me interested in them was the fact that they also
have drivers for linux and mac os.

I just got some maxim usb interface chips (MAX3420). I think they have
driver source code included. I haven't tried them out yet though.
 
S

ssc@remove_me.copelandelectronics.com

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi JG,

The development kit from Silicon Labs comes with the Windows drivers. I
think the newer ones come with Linux and Mac. I had to have them email
mine. These show up as another serial port on your 2K or XP system. The
sources and driver configuration utilities and information are on the CD as
well. We use them on some of our products here and they work very well.

Regards,

Scott
 
G

Genome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joe G (Home) said:
Hi All,

For the USB to Serial IC's - eg from FTDI and Silicon Labs.

Do the Silicon Labs and FTDI chips auto enumerate with Windows XP as a
HID Serial device.

IE - The driver is already in XP and no extra driver software required?

How about other USB to serial IC's.



Thanks in Advance?


Regards
JG

Yes!

As someone who has no association with the companies you have mentioned I
can gaurantee that you can plop these IC's on a thing and have them
recognised by Windows as C:

Thank you for thanking me in advance. I feel all gooey now.

DNA
 
D

Donald

Jan 1, 1970
0
Genome said:
As someone who has no association with the companies you have mentioned I
can gaurantee that you can plop these IC's on a thing and have them
recognised by Windows as C:

Does this mean it replaces your boot drive ???
 
L

Leef_me

Jan 1, 1970
0
The FTDI parts need drivers downloaded from their website. I evaluated the
chip by buying a
USB<--> RS-232 cable made by DLP DESIGN, The installation was
straight-forward and I was
running in less than 10 minutes.

Your email address says Australia, from the FTDI website, below would be a
local sales contact.

Leef_me


Dontronics Australia & New Zealand
Dontronics
P.O. Box 595
Tullamarine 3043
Australia Contact: Don McKenzie
E-Mail: http://www.dontronics.com/e-mail.html
URL: http://www.dontronics.com
 
Joe said:
For the USB to Serial IC's - eg from FTDI and Silicon Labs.

Do the Silicon Labs and FTDI chips auto enumerate with Windows XP as a HID
Serial device.

IE - The driver is already in XP and no extra driver software required?

I think they all require you to install a driver, at least in the
current version of XP. Techincally I only have experience with the
Silicon Labs (bare chip in a project) and whatever's inside the Belkin
adapter, but people seem to be saying the FTDI needs an install too?
 
M

Mike Harrison

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi All,

For the USB to Serial IC's - eg from FTDI and Silicon Labs.

Do the Silicon Labs and FTDI chips auto enumerate with Windows XP as a HID
Serial device.

IE - The driver is already in XP and no extra driver software required?

How about other USB to serial IC's.



Thanks in Advance?


Regards
JG


You need their drivers You don't really want Windows to recognise it as this could make it harder
for your application to figure out whether your device (as opposed to someone else's) is plugged in.
With the FTDI ones, you can program a unique Vendor/Product ID into the eeprom, and tweak the text
config files in their device driver package so that it appears like a dedicated driver for your
product, avoiding clashes with other devices using the same chip. FTDI will give you a small block
of product IDs to use if you ask them so you don't have to buy them from USB.org

I don't know if it's possible to make the FTDI look like a standard HID device- mouse, keyboard etc.
- I've not seen any mention of this anywhere, but they are usually very helpful if you email them so
it's worth asking if this is what you want to do.
 
R

Rich Grise

Jan 1, 1970
0
Does this mean it replaces your boot drive ???

No, he's running a two-floppy system; all he has is A: and B:. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich
 
J

Joel Kolstad

Jan 1, 1970
0
Mike Harrison said:
I don't know if it's possible to make the FTDI look like a standard HID
device- mouse, keyboard etc.
- I've not seen any mention of this anywhere, but they are usually very
helpful if you email them so
it's worth asking if this is what you want to do.

I've found FTDI's e-mail support responsive but also quite terse... if you ask
them a couple of questions, they're quite likely to only answer the first one,
and not in very much detail at that. Still -- given the responsiveness -- if
you keep on them sooner or later you'll get the information you need.

The other thing I'd note about FTDI is that -- like many companies -- they try
very hard not to directly mention any bugs in their software or hardware.
Instead, their documentation will say things like, "This bit in this register
should be set to 1" -- after just giving a long explanation of what the bit
does when it's 0 as well as 1. What they really mean is, "This bit should be
set to 1, because setting it to 0 doesn't actually work the way it was
intended to. Sorry."

You won't get any of the standard FTDI chips to appear as HID devices. The
flexibility of the parts is nowhere near wide enough to make that happen. As
for drivers, I don't believe drivers for any FTDI chips come on any Windows
installation CDs, although (and this is documented on FTDI's web site) one OEM
started making USB<-->serial converter cables with FTDI's ICs (and default VID
and PID) and went through the whole driver certification process with
Microsoft, so a particular version of the FTDI serial "emulation" driver is
now available on Windows Update. This can cause a problem, however, in that
it's a somewhat old version, so you jump through a few hoops to force Windows
to "do the right thing" if you want to install the latest version of their
drivers.

To the OP: Is there any particular reason you'd like the devices to show up as
HIDs?

---Joel Kolstad
 
G

Genome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Rich Grise said:
No, he's running a two-floppy system; all he has is A: and B:. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

Yeah, but they are 8 inch ones.....

Snurk!
DNA
 
D

Dave Farrance

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joe G \(Home\) said:
For the USB to Serial IC's - eg from FTDI and Silicon Labs.
Do the Silicon Labs and FTDI chips auto enumerate with Windows XP as a HID
Serial device.

IE - The driver is already in XP and no extra driver software required?

How about other USB to serial IC's.

Dunno about the FTDI and Silicon Labs devices. I guess that it depends
how long they've been around.

For example, I've got a USB serial cable containing a Prolific PL2303
and that's recognized right off by Win2000/XP and Linux releases of
(say) the past two years. It was supplied with a disk containing
drivers for early versions of Mac OSs and Windows.
 
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