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Appr. 1.44m long cable that provides an RS232 port (standard, appr. -/+ 8V voltage levels, compatible with genboard v3.x) on computers with USB port (most notebooks nowadays lack builtin RS232 port).
Depending on supply shipment, one of 2 types is in inventory (both have same pl2303 chip inside): the blue stlab (see image) or the "best-connectivity" (that is overmoulded grey, and comes with a DSUB9-25 adapter).
Driver available for all windows. But DO NOT USE the driver from the included CD (known to have caused many mysterious communication problem apparently working with some apps under some circumstances and not with others, due to buffering problems in the windows driver).
Make sure you download from
Unfortunately prolific has flooded the market with extremely bad windows drivers. Prolific drivers sometimes fail even with just Brayterm, but more likely to fail with more traffic.
Sometimes even takes the whole windows with it with blue death (a driver should never, do that ! If that happens, under any circumstances, that driver is crap.) Even worst with lotsof traffic (as in VemsTune) especially in a noisy environment (where the adapter chip sometimes resets). We are working on workarounds to get best possible effect out of the crappy driver.
Options are
- using linux live-USB (which goes around the windows-prolific crap altogether). Likely the only proper solution given that the windows driver sometimes even crashes before the application could open the port (the only cure for that is a good driver or a good OS).
- trying patterns that tend to avoid triggering the driver bugs (eg. if the flow of bytes is continuous, the windows driver dies less frequently than if the flow sometimes stops, than starts again - which is otherwise a perfectly normal flow-pattern for any serial port)
- getting Prolific release a nonfreezing driver for contemporary windows XP, 7, etc... versions working with their sold 10+ million pl2303 chips. This seems hard. When we requested, we did not even get a reply from them. The situation got worse around 2005-2006 and after that sometimes got better (almost seemed OK at a point), sometimes worse. You need luck and patience (likely 2nd or 3d driver) to find a driver that works for your XP.
Works very well on linux operating systems (driver included in kernel or modprobe pl2303) - since PL2303 is the most common USB-serial chip, most likely other OS-es too.
For the curious, the cable is powered from the host's USB port and contains
- USB chip: Prolific PL2303 this is a powerful chip that's HW-wise outperforms most of it's competitors (eg. in max bitrate)
- max232 for voltage conversion
- more info about the broken prolific windows-XP drivers here
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Versatile Engine Management Systems / / ACMV, LLC
