We have ordered several dozen USB to serial cables for testing with Realdash and our hardware. As posted in previous post, our hardware sends a continuous stream of real time data to Realdash, which handles this very well. However, we have seen poor results with various vendor USB/serial cables and combined with different PCs and revs of Windows. I am curious of others here on their experience; Keep in mind we baseline the USB /serial cables with Realterm, a serial terminal program, as a standard.
- Prolific. Not good, laggy, intermittent, unpredictable.
- FTDI. Seems to depend on version of windows and hardware. Sometimes great, sometimes not work with Realdash, even though we have fine data in Realterm.
- SiLabs. Works well consistently. The only complaint is there only seems to be 2 actual finished cables with socket pins for use as a polished device-mostly the Silabs option is a bareboard PCB with jumper pins and no case. also, the SiLabs seems to be somewhat intolerant to miswiring while the others are more forgiving. If one accidently crosses TX and RX, the CP2102 IC can and does fail. Not always, but sometimes.
I would like to hear others experience with these above…also if there is another brand we should evaluate.