I don<t know wich one I have (sould check) but for the moment I don<t even manage to make it work with the SEQ, before it worked with it and now no… I tried on all USB ports and… nothing… I worked on that uninstaling reinstaling stuff for 5 hours esterday about… (a lot of that is rebooting) the power is there… man…
because short of using the pre-defined USB device types you wind up writing full blown device firmware on your micro board and full blown device drivers for any OS and platform you need to support and then including code in your application to work wit the driver you created.
Serial port is very easy, its use is reasonably well defined across different OS and platforms, and there are lots of examples and documentation on how to access serial devices in application code.
The recent struggling point is when different manufacturers each bundle the half a dozen or so cheap and available ASICs doing USB-to-serial port translation into their own products, or heaven help you they go off and create their own wildcard version, and then half ass support the end product because it’s a $30 popcorn item they are only interested in making the easy money. Then folks wind up asking dealers of other product to support the cheapest usb-to-serial part they could find like it is somehow their responsibility.
Real life example: we had a customer that dealt with this for a long time until they deciced to sell as an accessory a particular translator product that they had good experience with. now when a customer calls in and says their product isn’t communicating through the brand crap translator they bought the tech support answer is to either purchase the one they sell and support (or more to the point don’t usually have to) or direct them to whatever existing support might be available for the brand crap part they chose to buy instead.
wow this turned into a long post. 
on topic though, I tried to see if I could figure out what Sam’s translator was using for its guts and came up empty. they have either made their own or done a good job of bundling an ASIC that I am not familliar with. sorry.
EB
How did you look for that?
I know the fealings of having a Serial to USB converter not work properly. I have gone through this with my portable and again now with my new desktop machine (A new DELL XPS running Vista) which also has no serial port.
As mentioned in other threads, I updated the reset hold time to a longer value…
Last night I first tried with the BAFO 810, which is AcidTech’s favorite and the Atom Pro software did not connect to my Brat. This adapter uses the Prolific driver, which windows update found a signed driver for it. On my Portable earlier I was able to make this one work if I plugged it into a powered USB hub. I did not have any luck yet on this one.
I then tried my other one, which has always worked for me in the past. I believe this a StarTech cable. It uses the FTDI chipset. Vista found an unsigned driver and after going through the warnings, this cable was able to see my Brat! I had the very slow response time that I mentioned in a previous thread. I was able to speed it up a lot by changing the advanced settings in the device driver.
There are several discussions about this scattered in many of the different forums, including:
lynxmotion.net/viewtopic.php?t=1472
Which one are you using? I do not remember reading which OS you are using, but I will assume XP or Vista? If you don’t know which adapter you have, you might try opening up the device manager on your pc and double click on the item that corresponds to your comm port. There you could find information like which chip set it has and which drivers are installed.
Good Luck
The only cable type of USB to serial converter that I’ve found to work well for general serial I/O appears to be a StarTech one. I’ve tried a lot of the adapters and most don’t work or have issues. Inexpensive units from ebay vendors and surplus dealers never seem to work as advertised. For the real serial I/O geek, the below type of edgeport USB adapters are well liked. Beware of any adapter that has thumb screws on the DB9 end.
ok, I will try and put the hold time to longer.
I have a Windows XP.
my USB to serial is a prolifiric one… dunno more, I will go check.
startech, if, after all my test it stil doen<t work I will buy one of these or the one zoomkat said, looks good even if it’s more expensive… but I don’t need 8 LOL
basically went to the link you provided and searched and downloaded everything I could find, most notably the drivers usually will clue you into whos product it is. I didn’t find anything I recognized which isn’t conclusive by any means but I have had a fair amount of dealings with these things in trying to support products being built for customers in the past. meh, take it for what it’s worth, someone else might do the same and nail it in less than a minute. 
damn, I tried on my other PC (a windows 98 that receives internet via a D-link) but thanks to my brother that trew the d-link on the floor so many times and brook the antena, the internet is either realy slow or it doesn’t even go, so I need to download the BS2 editor and it’s long… and then, if it works o that computer, well I’ll have to go buy another USB-to-serial converter (apparently StarTech looks good), or a thing that I connect to my computer (like the one zoomkat showd me)
An update here. This morning, I tried my other USB hub (Linksys USB 2 powered hub) and wsa able to make the BAFO 810 work with my BRAT on my machine running Vista.
Hello again, so I went in a bit of programing lately (C++) and I got distracted from my project 
but anyway it was just frustarating since my stupid USB to serial didn’t work 
So, could any of you tell me wich model you bought and works **great, no bugs, or no on/off, sometimes, something that works all the time please. ** thank you
I have the parallax usb too serial , parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=28030
make shure u get the driver [ parallax.com/html_pages/down … rivers.asp
]( parallax.com/html_pages/down … rivers.asp),