Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re going to be talking about this little board which I designed and assembled myself, it’s a breakout module for the FTDI FT232H which is a usb to serial converter but with a nice twist. This particular chip from FTDI has the built-in Multi-Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine (MPSSE short) which allows you to run a variety of synchronous serial protocols like JTAG, I2C, SPI or simple bit-banging of IOs. You can imagine it can be really useful to be able to interface with a sensor over I2C or SPI straight from your computer over USB through this interface. You wouldn’t need an arduino or other controller in the middle if you plan to do some data acquisition for example.
Tag: Serial
Voltlog #262 – Is This The Future of Our Hobby?
To be honest I didn’t think we were going to have services like these available so cheap so fast. I mean yes I know pcb prices have been so low in the past couple of years that it no longer makes sense to etch your own PCBs, unless you are in a big hurry. But having smt assembly service so cheap? Soon enough it would not make sense to hand assemble these boards because it would be equally cheap to have them assembled at JLCPCB
Voltlog #261 – InTheMail
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.
Voltlog #260 – How do you test usb to serial converters? (CP2103 vs CH340E vs FT232RL)
Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’re comparing a few different serial to usb adapters and the discussion started ever since I showed the CH340E breakout board I designed in voltlog #249. People wanted to know if this CH340E affordable chip would perform similar to the well known FTDI or Silicon labs chips, and I’m thinking at high throughput and reliability here, the kind of application where you are sending lots of data, fast and you need it to be transferred reliably.
So today I’m going to compare the CH340E with a CP2103, and the FT232RL. I wasn’t sure what measurements to take and how to test these but I devised 2 testing methods.
Voltlog #259 – InTheMail
Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We’re going to start with this small white box, which looks very uninteresting from the outside but contains something really nice, it’s a machined aluminium heatsink, designed specifically for the raspberry pi 4 and inside the box you get the two halves of the heatsink plus some mounting screws and silicone thermal pads.
There is a decent amount of aluminium in this heatsink, and we can see it has these rectangular raised islands for contact with the main chips on the board, so this is where the silicone pads will go. This is a completely passive heatsink and that’s what I was looking for but if you want more cooling power these are also actively cooled heatsink. feel like I should test this in a separate video to see how efficient it is when compared to a no heatsink solution which we already know doesn’t work well with the raspberry pi as it gets pretty hot. So we’ll leave this for a future video.
Voltlog #249 – Making Some USB Serial Converter Boards With CH340E (part 1)
Welcome to a new video, today I’m building a bunch of usb to serial converter boards because if you are into electronics and microcontrollers you will for sure need a bunch of usb to serial converters to connect your boards to a computer for example.
The idea for building these boards started when I found the CH340E converter chip on aliexpress, I like several things about this chip, it was small because it comes in MSOP10 package, it was cheap at about $0.40 a piece and it requires minimal external circuitry, in fact it only needs an external bypass cap.
Voltlog #50 – InTheMail
A new InTheMail video because mail items have been constantly coming in. I hope you’ll find it interesting and if that’s the case, hit that like button so I know you like this kind of video.
Here is a list of items shown in this video:
- DC-DC Adjustable Step-Down Module with LCD
- OLED Panel Meter 0-33V 0-3A
- PWM DC Motor Speed Control
- BQ24650 MPPT Solar Panel Lithium Lead Acid Battery Charge Controller 5A
- Battery BMS Protection Board For 3S 18650 Lithium Battery
- Battery BMS Protection Board For 3-4S 18650 Lithium Battery
- Mini DC-DC converter Module
- RS232 Bluetooth Serial Adapter
- HC-05 Bluetooth Module
- MP3 Format U Disk TF Card decoder board module amplifier player
- Digispark Attiny85 Micro USB Development Board
- RFID T5577 125KHz EM4100 ID Card Copier Duplicator
- HC-SR505 Mini Infrared PIR Motion Sensor
- NCP1203D60 PWM Controller IC
- Energy Meter Electricity Monitor
You can find links for all of these items in the video description.