[alias_neo]

I'm not sure why I expected more, but I was a little disappointed.

Soldering some wires onto an FTDI chip in a pinch is great, but the chip is doing all of the work really. I was hoping to learn I could make a serial to USB with _less than_ an FTDI chip.

That said, respect for the effort of taking the photos and writing it up, and it was worth a read to learn about those naughty Scots bricking peoples devices with bad drivers.

[Havoc]

>expected more

It's the field - very wide range of ability. Some are stoked about making LEDs blink and others are busy dumping and reverse engineering ROMs. Just depends on one's own journey stage. In my case article is above my level...haven't dealt with UART before

[bartlettD]

Agreed, its a nice accessible article for beginners. I can see someone who has really only played with Arduinos and Adufruit modules looking at this and getting some inspiration to try out some of the techniques he mentions.

For example, you'd be suprised how many practicing EEs I've met who aren't aware drag soldering is a thing. (Which is a fantastic technique btw, saves so much time and gets you much nicer joints than individually soldering )

[ajsnigrutin]

USB is hard... you need a chip to deal with it. "Back in my day", you could bitbang stuff with a parallel port, but those days are gone.

I would've picked a more lazy approach, just pull the atmega chip from an arduino (to not cause issues), and use the rx and tx pins on the (now empty) arduino board, since they're both connected to ftdi chip already, and no de/soldering is needed.

[magnat]

You can actually bit-bang low speed USB on Arduino [0]. There is even a bootloader [1] for ATtiny visible to host as HID USB device. It is obviously not compatible with Arduino, but those tiny boards look too cute to ignore [2]. Also, you can use USB port both for downloading firmware and your application.

[0] https://github.com/obdev/v-usb

[1] https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus

[2] https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/the-nanite-85/

[fstokesman]

Totally fair point. One of the videos I'm going to get around to making on my channel at some stage is a UART transceiver on an FPGA. Definitely not the "easier in a pinch" I was originally going for, but hey, if you've got the hardware hanging around!

[alias_neo]

I didn't mean for that to come across as a criticism, I was disappointed because I was hoping to learn something new, but I'm not the target for that post; I have a degree in Electronic Engineering and a couple of decades of tinkering.

I'll be interested in some FPGA content; I built my dissertation project on FPGA and would love to see some modern, affordable FPGA boards/circuits with useful I/O to actually build something like this. I'm sure they exist, I've just never looked.

Thanks for the interesting read and I'll keep an eye on your repo!