www.coridium.us/forum

I purchased a few of the PROstart boards and I am trying to communicate with them. I have CH340 boards that I use with Arduinos but I am not having any luck with the PROstart. Due to the issues with the genuine FTDI chips, I now only use the CH340. Will I have to find a FTDI programming dongle? The CH340 board only has TXD and RXD out. Do I need DTR?
Thanks!

For BASIC you only need RESET. For C you can either short the programming pin yourself or get one of our dongles which does that with the other control pin. Details in the help files.

I have not tried the CH340 boards, but have had luck with the $10 FTDI boards on eBay, but some of the $3 "FTDI" boards do have the driver issue. There are work arounds that you can find on the web (I can't publish them as I have to respect their IP). I have not bought any in a year or 2. SparkFun should also be a source for USB dongles.

Since we build so few of the dongles they are expensive from us at--

http://www.coridium.us/catalog/product_ ... ucts_id=83

After doing some more reading on the site and the forums it seems that the BASIC software looks for the FTDI driver. I have an USB to 9 PIN RS232 converter that is not recognized either.

So as not to waste any more time, I did purchase a programming dongle from the site. Yes it more expensive but it will work out of the box and I do not mind supporting the cause.

Thanks,
Larry

BASICtools is looking for FTDI, mbed or Teensy serial ports. But it should see the CH340 as a com port, all lower case. The question is which com port it is, normally the PC reserves 1-3 for internal devices, but I could be wrong.

According to the schematic I looked at, the CH340 should drive DTR to reset, through a large cap. That should actually work with Coridium boards. The required connections are GND, RXD, TXD, that DTR reset, and power from somewhere, typically 5V from USB.

The CH340 boards are showing as com3. The ones I have do not have a DTR signal out. I am sure I could hack the board but will do so at another time. I will use the FTDI board for now and keep it simple.

Received the FTDI board today and it worked like a charm. Loaded a few examples without an issue. Now on to the hard stuff!

Just for giggles I tried the CH340 again for comparison. It connects but no matter what the baud is set to, it spits out garbage. No wonder it does not know it is connected. I will let you know what I find out when I have time to troubleshoot the issue.

Thanks for the quick shipping!

I ordered a couple of these and they came in today. I changed the connector from male to female, plugged it in, updated the driver from the web. And it works fine with BASIC. I have no idea how they can make these and sell them for $1.66.