Before USB standardized how we connect devices, computers were a tangle of incompatible ports. Here are the ones that USB ...

In my last column [see LJ December 2002], we covered the serial layer in the 2.5 (hopefully soon to be 2.6) kernel tree. We mentioned in passing that a USB-to-serial driver layer in the kernel helps ...

To communicate with a device connected via universal serial bus (USB), a computer needs the driver, not just for the device itself, but also for the USB controller. Microsoft Windows uses USB ...

Chances are high that most of us deal with USB cables at least once a day. Whether that's because you're plugging in your phone to charge, or connecting a device to your PC, USBs are a common part of ...

FTDI-gate wasn’t great for anybody, and now with hardware hobbyists and technological tinkerers moving away from the most popular USB to serial adapter, some other chip has to fill the void. The ...

You may recognize the RS-232 serial port on your TV, but do you know all that it can do? It's probably more than you realized ...

Some software and specialty hardware requires you to use a traditional serial port. Serial ports have been around for decades and work by transferring one bit of data at a time at a relatively slow ...

Prolific PL2303 is a USB-to-Serial adapter cable that lets you connect your computer to the devices with serial ports, like a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller). When you connect a device with your ...

In Part I of this article, I briefly mentioned the generic USB driver in the context of getting a USB device to communicate through it easily, with no custom kernel programming. Unfortunately, I ...