Posts Tagged ‘:hack’
FTDI Serial Adapter as a Simple Digital Interface
I’ve had the good fortune to be accepted as an occasional contributor to the Hack a Day blog. (Hack being slang for an informal method of engineering, not criminal acts!)
My first substantive tutorial for the site describes the use of FTDI Bitbang Mode, a method of using a common, inexpensive USB-to-serial adapter as a quick & dirty GPIO interface. This facilitates the sort of prototyping typically done using microcontrollers, but in the comfortable and unconstrained development environment of mainstream PCs. The technique is particularly well-suited to SPI-type protocols; I’ve had this communicating with shift registers, LED driver chips and even video overlay ICs, as well as reading various optical rotary and linear encoders.
You can read the full article over at hackaday.com.
Tags: adapter, bit bang, bitbang, ftdi, hack, hackaday, hacking, interfacing, protocol, serial, spi, usb