Oh boy, another question. No way to ask this without exposing my ingorance…
In the situation where I want to communicate between a PC and the ABB while programs are running on the ABB (via a serial port on the PC, that is) I know I need a TTL converter.
**But… **Do I need just need to connect an Input and an Output from the converter to the ABB (And 5 volts to power the converter in the case of the SuperDroid converter I bought) OR do I need DTS/CTS? I hope I only need the I and O because that’s the one I bought.
*I am but a simple Web Developer. Your magical talking serial boxes frighten me! * 
You won’t need the CTS/RTS pins. These are for hardware flow control and are unsupported on most micros. RX and TX can sometimes be confusing because the need to be crossed and they’re not always labelled from the same perspective. The jist of it is that the TX pin in SideA needs to be connected the RX on SideB and vice-versa, and the GND’s tied together. If the converter isn’t USB based, you’ll need to supply it power as well.
Whew. Thanks!
That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t certain.
Of course I bought the version that has everything on a four-pin header, so I’ll have to move the pins into two seperate two-pin plugs, but that’s an annoyance at worst.
Now: to test this, shouldn’t I be able to open something like Hyperterm on the on-board PC that is communicating via the TTL converter, and set up a loop program on the ABB to “Serin” at whatever pin I connect this to, and perhaps echo it back with serout, or echo it to the debug, for that matter?
Oh yeah! one more question: do I need to do the “invert” when I do the serout? (IE serout myPin, i9600,“Hello, World”)
someone who knows something about the atom is going to have to answer that one. 
Thanks, Andy!
Serout and Serin work!
I slipped the two power pins out of the four-pin header and gave them their own two-pin connector. Right now I’m wasting two pins that are covered by the empty spots in the original four-pin TTL converter plug, but I’ll worry about that once I go back to doing more of the mechanics.
(BTW, I needed the “i” to invert, also.)
