Most individuals in most of the people don’t have any want for direct serial connections — there’s a cause that computer systems haven’t generally included serial ports in many years. However there may be nonetheless plenty of tools that depends on serial communication and so working with that tools is tough when you’ll be able to’t discover a fashionable pc with a suitable port. Sadly, the standard USB-to-serial adapters available on the market are very unreliable. That’s why Excamera created TermDriver and it was an excellent answer. Now they’re making ready to launch the TermDriver 2 and it has all types of nice enhancements.
TermDriver 2 is a compact, self-contained gadget able to establishing serial communication with different gadgets, with baud charges from 1200 to 2Mbit. It accepts each 3.3V and 5V, and it has each DTR and CTS management alerts. All the things else a couple of connection protocol is configurable, so TermDriver 2 ought to work with the overwhelming majority of serial gadgets made within the final 50 years.
However whereas TermDriver 2 can talk with serial gadgets all by itself, it’s actually supposed to behave as a USB-to-serial adapter between a contemporary PC and the serial gadget. With a 32KB enter buffer, it might deal with numerous overflow. And since it maintains the serial connection immediately, timing isn’t a problem. These two elements resolve just about the entire reliability issues that folks are likely to encounter with typical USB-to-serial adapters.
That distinctive performance additionally makes TermDriver 2 able to displaying an emulated terminal all by itself. That seems on a 1.3” IPS show with a decision of 240×240 pixels, which is constructed proper into the gadget. It shows 60×23 characters and has full ANSI escape code help, together with shade info.
That’s all attainable as a result of Excamera constructed TermDriver 2 round a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, which has {hardware} serial ports and loads of reminiscence and processing energy for the duty. The RP2040 is on a small customized PCB, with only a handful of different elements. It has feminine headers on one facet for the serial connection and a micro USB port on the opposite facet for the connection to the PC.
It isn’t clear if Excamera will launch PC software program for sending instructions or information over the serial connection, or if TermDriver 2 will merely echo something ship over the USB connection (as you would do with the unique TermDriver).
If TermDriver 2 pursuits you, you’ll be able to join updates on the Crowd Provide web page.
