Hello,
I am trying to communicate with the APSX RW-110/210 RFID scanners. Currently I have a USB pigtail cable wired into the terminals of the scanner where D+/D- are TX/RC respectively. The data sheet acknowledges this as a way to connect the chip to a PC however does not provide further instruction on communication through usb, but only through com ports. Has anyone used a USB connection to talk to the scanner?
Any help is appreciated!
-Cullen
Hi Cullen,
From what we understand from the information provided by the manufacturer, a simple USB A cable with wires exposed on the other end is not enough. The device uses a 5 V DC UART TTL serial interface, not a USB compatible interface and therefore needs an interface chip to translate from UART to USB and back.
We do sell such cables like the FTDI USB-to-TTL (Serial) 5V Cable. You can also choose to interface the device to a microcontroller (like Arduino) and interface that to your computer by USB instead.
Sincerely,
Thank you for the response. I failed to notice that the USB cable listed on APSX had an embedded translator.
So given the correct cable, the scanner will be able to communicate to my PC via the usb port? I know the test software communicates through the com ports, will my pc identify the cable and have the connection appear as a com, similar to if I were using a Serial USB adapter?
Thanks!
Hi Cullen,
An FTDI USB-to-serial 5V cable will appear as a USB virtual serial port (COM port) using the FTDI drivers. These should install automatically under Windows and most other platforms/operating systems since they are very standard at this point.
Simply make sure to connect the TX of the cable to the RX of the device and the RX of the cable to the TX of the device and you should be good to go.
Sincerely,
