Spiff's Electronics Notebook: Search Results

Single Sided FT232RL USB-Serial Converter (January 25, 2008)

Available assembled or as a kit from our WebStore.

Unsatisfied with everything else, I present the simple, single-sided, breadboardable, FT232RL based USB to TTL Serial converter.

I know you're thinking "But everyone under the sun makes an FT232 kit!", and you're right. But they all suffer from a selection of problems:

Double sided boards with tiny vias. Not only are these a pain to solder by hand, they also require perfect precision to etch and drill at home.
7 million parts butted as close to each other as the pick-and-place can tolerate. I can't assemble these with tweezers.
Signals and power brought out to a DIL style header. There's simply no effective way to plug a DIL header into a breadboard. It's a functional system for wirewrap, perfboards, and stripboards but so is a DIP style connection. It's not very helpful for custom PCBs either, since I might as well integrate the whole circuit into the board.
You get the idea.

The answer of course is to design a simple, roomy, single sided board, with a DIP like fit.