I am looking at new laptops and it seems laptops with serial ports are a dying breed... I know that Picaxe sells a download cable in USB form but I think I might be getting into i2c programming, that peek and poke thing etc. --All the stuff you need an ol' fashoned serial port for.
Question:
Has anyone ever used or tried a USB to serial adapter? They are as cheap as $6 on ebay but I have no idea if the programming editor or any other serial based software will work with it or even recognise it. Does anyone have any thoughts?
I havent used one yet, but I’ve been looking into it as I have the same issue.
As far as how they work, I’ve got a usb bluetooth adapter that can be mapped to different com ports so I think this would do the same thing. You might need to do some configuring, but minmal only.
I just read the PDF for the picaxe USB cord and it seems A) it is the same as a USB/Serial adapter -they just skipped the big wide plug and just used the 3 conductors you need and B) the computer just sticks in some drivers and calls it a "virtual com" port.
This gives me hope it will work, but keep the info coming, folks.
