Recommended USB/Serial Adapters

Summary:

• Recommended chipset: FTDI (Brands: Dontronic, FTDI, etc)
• No known problems: Silicon Labs
• Not recommended: Prolific (Brands: ATEN, etc)

More Information:

Clipsal recommend USB/Serial adapters containing the FTDI chipset.

In-house we use the following Dontronics-branded products:

* Dontronics EasySync Premium Gold 10cm (US232R-10) [http://www.dontronics-shop.com/easysync-premium-gold-usb-rs232-adapter-cable-10cm-cable.html]
* Dontronics EasySync Premium Gold 1m ( US232R-100) [http://www.dontronics-shop.com/easysync-premium-gold-usb-rs232-adapter-cable-1-meter-cable.html]

Dontronics is an Australian reseller with EMC number N14327 for Australian C-Tick Approval.

The original (identical) FTDIChip devices can be found here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables/USBRS232.htm

The FTDI drivers can be found here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

There are many suppliers for these devices and rebadged versions of them. As long as they are good quality products and use the ftdichip.com drivers, they should work fine.

There are of course other devices and drivers that work but we don't have an exhaustive list. Other than FTDI there are two other widely used chipsets.

Silicon Labs chipsets should also be okay as they are known for quality and we use them inside some of our products.

Prolific chipsets tend to be more budget-oriented and they feature prominently in problems reported by users. They are known to produce garbled text and don't work at all with the latest versions of our software.