SAMD11 Provides Two Serial Ports For Price Of One

Whilst the normal computer system consumer possible has not supplied considerably considered to the lowly serial port in many years, the very same can’t be said for the components hacker. Low cost serial-to-USB adapters are a must have for snooping debug ports or programming chips, and if you inquire us, you can by no means have much too lots of laying close to the bench. [Quentin Bolsée] loves them so a great deal that he’s even figured out how to develop a dual-port adapter with a SAMD11C14 microcontroller.

As [Quentin] points out in the produce-up, this isn’t just some form of Y-cable. When connected to the host personal computer, the adapter demonstrates up as two distinctive serial ports, just about every with impartial settings for things like baud amount and parity. This handy very little gadget will allow you tap into the serial ports of two gadgets concurrently if you are searching to do some Hollywood-design hacking, but extra virtually, it lets you to establish a debug and programming interface to the similar board making use of just a person USB link.

[Quentin] milled a customized PCB for his adapter, which we have to say looks phenomenal, but these with extra restricted gear at home should really be in a position to send out the MIT licensed board documents off for generation. He’s also offered the source code for the SAMD11C14’s firmware, so you’ve bought every little thing you need to spin up your have model of this neat software.

Two ports not more than enough for your parallel hacking desires? Believe that it or not, we’ve also noticed a quad USB-to-serial adapter that you can put collectively, however it’s a significantly additional complex circuit.