SparkFun Electronics - USB to RS232 Converter

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Product Info

USB to RS232 Converter

sku: CAB-08580

Description: We do lots of converting from TTL serial to USB (using the FTDI and Silicon Labs ICs). But what do you do if you've got a laptop and need RS232 serial? This is a high quality, low cost, small, and easy to use USB to RS232 converter. Device uses the Prolific IC PL-2303 and supports baud rates up to 1Mbps. Driver support for Windows, Mac, and Linux RedHat.

Our only problem with this device is the hex nuts on either side of the RS232 connector. These will often interfere and hit the hex nuts on the device you are attempting to connect to. Our recommendation is to grab a pair of pliers and pop these two hex nuts out of the black plastic housing. Pretty easy to do and will guarantee that it will connect to any device.

Device comes with a USB A to B cable.

Documents: Drivers

Pricing

	72 in stock backorder allowed

$12.95	price
$11.66	10-99 (10% off)
$10.36	100+ (20% off)

	quantity

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Comments

9 comments

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	by Doug Wood +1.3 \| August 19, 2008 at 7:55 AM 0
I am using VMWare Fusion on the Mac to run Windows in order to use some PC only robotic software on my Mac. I got this adapter to replace my old KeySpan adapter when I found that the KeySpan would not connect to some devices such as the Lynxmotion SSC-32 servo controller from my Mac using Fusion. This adapter works great.

	by Limb +2.3 \| December 6, 2008 at 8:49 AM 0
This also works fine under plain old Mac OSX. Use it to program my AVR with AVRFuses and avrdude right within OSX.

	by marosy +1 \| February 25, 2009 at 7:38 AM 0
It does NOT work with the latest prolific drivers PL2303_Prolific_DriverInstaller_1025.zip The device can't start. Howerver it works with PL2303-Driver_XP2K_v204102. But still it is preferable that a product to work with the latest drivers!

	by Param +3 \| March 26, 2009 at 9:07 AM 0
Exactly... that's the problem I had. Where do I get that old driver?

	by DaveAllan +1.3 \| April 3, 2009 at 10:53 AM 0
Does the PIC-PG1 (sku: PGM-00009) work with this serial port? The documentation for the PG1 specifically says "USB to serial cables have also not been proven to work." but that suggests that some USB-to-serial dongles do work.

	by DaveAllan +1.3 \| April 7, 2009 at 10:41 AM 0
I emailed the same question to sparkfun support and got a very uncertain maybe.

	by EvanT +1 \| April 18, 2009 at 7:31 PM 0
I think thats splitting hairs, unless the only reason it wouldn't work it noise in the cable.

	by Mathieu +2.1 \| January 14, 2010 at 3:08 PM 0
The Prolific IC contains GPIO. Did someone test if those were routed on the DB9? Same for power?

	by RocketGuy +2.6 \| February 8, 2010 at 10:33 AM 0
We found working drivers for Mac/Snowleopard, the sourcforge open driver for the chip works just fine. http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/