USB-RS232 adapter in FreeBSD 5?

Murray Taylor MTaylor at bytecraft.com.au
Sat Sep 3 23:14:05 PDT 2005


 

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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Bill Moran
Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2005 9:43 AM
To: questions at freebsd.org
Subject: USB-RS232 adapter in FreeBSD 5?


I've got a USB -> RS232 adapter I'm trying to get working on
5.3-RELEASE.

I've seen a lot of comments about these kind of things that seem to
indicate that they can be used (I occasionally have needs to use this
lappy as a serial console, and I'd like to use it to demonstrate a
serial barcode scanner that we have - normally, tip would work great
for this, but the laptop doesn't have a native RS-232 port).

Anyway, I get the impression that I'm missing some early, basic steps
to get this working.  dmesg shows:

ugen0: Prolific Technology Inc. USB-Serial Controller, rev 1.10/3.00,
addr 2

But neither tip nor cu seems to talk to ugen0 very well.  Other posts
I've seen seem to indicate that I need to be talking to a ucom0 device,
but I see nothing like that in /dev.  Is there something missing from
my kernel?  I haven't been able to find any reference to ucom in the
GENERIC or NOTES files.

Any advice/pointers is welcome.

TIA.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com


Be advised -- usb->serial adapters in general can have problems with
real world devices that need serial port control lines as the usb
dongles
do not support them at all.

As 'replacements' for a real serial port, they are a dismal failure,
unless you
are talking to a device that _only_ uses TxD, Rxd and Gnd.


I have had to try these toys on newer laptops (sans serial ports!) to
communicate
with PLC's etc and they do not work. 
This is not an O/S dependancy, the dongle and the USB protocol do not 
support the hardware handshake lines.


mjt
-- 
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Murray Taylor
Bytecraft Systems
E: mtaylor at bytecraft.com.au


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