serial port

36 Articles

USB To Serial Adapter Tells You What COM Port You’re On

January 14, 2013 by 32 Comments

xser

Since most of us are long past the days of hardware serial ports, the USB to serial adapter has become a mainstay on the hacker’s tool belt. While they’re cheap and convenient, USB to serial adapters aren’t always the easiest thing to use: there’s always the issue of what COM port Windows is calling your USB to serial adapter, or what TTY device it is in Linux/OS X.

[Avishay] has a very, very cool solution to this problem: put a display on a USB to serial converter to tell the user what COM port the OS labeled it as.

The prototype runs on a PIC  18F2553 dev board. When plugged into a Windows box, the serial adapter sets up two USB devices. The first device is a Communications Device Class that handles the grunt work of the USB to Serial connection. The second USB device is a proprietary piece of software that grabs the current COM port number. This number is displayed on an LCD thanks to a host application on the Windows PC that reports the COM port of the Serial adapter.

It’s one of those ideas where you didn’t know you needed it until it was presented to you. An excellent tool from [Avishay], although maybe a pair of 7-segment LEDs would make it a more manufacturable device.

Rooting Your AT&T U-verse Modem

December 13, 2012 by 26 Comments

Unhappy with the performance of his U-verse modem [Jordan] decided to dig in and see if a bit of hacking could improve the situation. Motorola makes this exclusively for AT&T and there are no other modems on the market which can used instead. Luckily he was able to fix almost everything that was causing him grief. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is a hardware hack that gains access to a shell though the UART. The second is a method of rooting the device from its stock web interface.

We think the biggest improvement gained by hacking this router is true bridge mode. The hardware is more than capable of behaving this way but AT&T has disabled the feature with no option for an unmodified device to use it. By enabling it the modem does what a modem is supposed to do: translate between WAN and LAN. This allows routing to be handled by a router (novel idea huh?).

Sound Card Microcontroller/PC Communication

July 10, 2011 by 40 Comments

The usual way send data from a microcontroller is either over RS-232 with MAX232 serial ICs, crystals, and a relatively ancient computer, or by bit-banging the USB protocol and worrying about driver issues. Not content with these solutions, [Scott] came up with sound card μC/PC communication that doesn’t require any extra components.

[Scott] bought a cheap USB sound card dongle on eBay (although a built-in sound card will do) and wired up the tip and ring of the plug to the microcontroller. The data is sent from the microcontroller a lot like Morse code – a short gap between pulses is a zero, a long gap is a one. This is parsed by a Python script using PyAudio. Synchronization, timing, and calibration is automatic because of a 10-bit ‘packet header’ explained in this video.

Continue reading “Sound Card Microcontroller/PC Communication” →

Serial Port JTAG Programmer

May 22, 2011 by 9 Comments

If you’re planning to do some hacking with CPLD or FPGA chips you’ll need a way to program them. JTAG is one of the options and here’s a cheap method that uses the serial port (translated).

This method requires only four signals (TDI, TMS, TCK and TDO) plus ground. But the problem is that an RS232 serial port operates with 12V logic levels and the JTAG side of the programmer needs to operate with the logic levels native to the device you’re programming. Commercial programmers use a level convert IC to take care of this for you, but that doesn’t mesh with the cheap goal of this project. Instead, [Nicholas] uses Zener diodes and voltage dividers to make the conversion. There is also an LED for each data signal to give some feedback if you’re having trouble.

You can use this along with a programming application that [Nicholas] whipped up using Visual Studio. It works well via the serial port, but he did try programming with a USB-to-Serial dongle. He found that this method slows the process down to an unbearable 5-minutes. Take a look, maybe you can help to get that sloth-like programming up to a manageable speed.

[Thanks Alex]

Adding A Serial Port Through An RJ45 Connector

December 30, 2010 by 21 Comments

[Mike Lu] likes to add serial ports to his routers to use for debugging but he didn’t want to drill holes in his new RT-N12. After a bit of head-scratching he thought about repurposing the four unused wires on one of the RJ45 Ethernet connectors. This would allow him to interface with the necessary signals and still have the option of using that port for a network connection. The first step was to build the circuit to output the correct serial levels and connect it to the unused pins on the jack. Next, to separate serial and Ethernet on the outside of the router he build a short adapter cable.

This is an elegant solution if you’re looking for zero case modifications. But if you don’t mind a few inconspicuous holes we love the serial port used on this Dockstar.

How-to: Bus Pirate V1, Improved Universal Serial Interface

January 22, 2009 by 65 Comments

front450a

We use the Bus Pirate to interface a new chip without writing code or designing a PCB. Based on your feedback, and our experience using the original Bus Pirate to demonstrate various parts, we updated the design with new features and cheaper components.

There’s also a firmware update for both Bus Pirate hardware versions, with bug fixes, and a PC AT keyboard decoder. Check out the new Hack a Day Bus Pirate page, and browse the Bus Pirate source code in our Google code SVN repository.

We cover the design updates and interface a digital to analog converter below.

Continue reading “How-to: Bus Pirate V1, Improved Universal Serial Interface” →