Before USB standardized how we connect devices, computers were a tangle of incompatible ports. Here are the ones that USB ...

In my last column [see LJ December 2002], we covered the serial layer in the 2.5 (hopefully soon to be 2.6) kernel tree. We mentioned in passing that a USB-to-serial driver layer in the kernel helps ...

To communicate with a device connected via universal serial bus (USB), a computer needs the driver, not just for the device itself, but also for the USB controller. Microsoft Windows uses USB ...

FTDI-gate wasn’t great for anybody, and now with hardware hobbyists and technological tinkerers moving away from the most popular USB to serial adapter, some other chip has to fill the void. The ...

USB naming conventions have always been confusing, but perhaps none more so than USB 3.2 Gen 1 and Gen 2. Here's what you ...

We know, you’ve already got a USB to serial adapter. Probably several of them, in fact. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t use one more — especially when it’s as as cleverly designed as this one from ...

Some software and specialty hardware requires you to use a traditional serial port. Serial ports have been around for decades and work by transferring one bit of data at a time at a relatively slow ...

Prolific PL2303 is a USB-to-Serial adapter cable that lets you connect your computer to the devices with serial ports, like a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller). When you connect a device with your ...

A socket that connects to a serial interface (one bit following another over one line). Serial ports are widely used by sensors for data acquisition, and they were standard on early computers for ...

In Part I of this article, I briefly mentioned the generic USB driver in the context of getting a USB device to communicate through it easily, with no custom kernel programming. Unfortunately, I ...