Serial driver for FTDI-USB devices needed?

Since three months my car was suffering from a problem with its motor management. A week ago I repaired the motor management but however I decided to buy an OBD-adapter to have better diagnostics possibilites in future.

The OBD-adapter provides an OBD chip of course but it also makes usage of an USB to serial converter chip from FTDI.

I am meanwhile relatively sure that I shall get the adapter working under RISC OS. The USB endpoints can be simply used for direct communication. However under Windows there is a layer above the direct USB one. Every FTDI serial converter will be represented as a COM-Port also.

The FTDI chips seems to be very popular as stand alone converters or in conjunction with other devices. So for me the question raised whether it would make sense to write a serial device driver for the FTDI chips for RISC OS also or whether it would be better to design the applications in such a way that they are making direct usage of the USB access?

The only missing point would be the setup of the serial interface parameters like baud rate etc. which must be handled by USB control requests at FTDI chips.

If there is a demand for a FTDI serial driver I would try to write one.

Regards

Thomas Milius

Today I played around a lot with ODB-adapter without getting success to access it. It took me while to find out that the baud rate etc. has not been intialized. The according LINUX driver I looked in to find out the sequences also removes some internal bytes from FTDI chip so I think it would make sense to write a “serial” ftdi device driver. Must see when I shall find the time to do so.

A long long time after I wrote this I made it to finish the first version of my FTDI driver for RISC OS today. However it requires USBdriver V0.49 or later. You can downlaod it from ROOLs CVS repository in bsd section.

Hello Thomas, It looks like your FTDI driver is what I am looking for to start solving my challenge in this post:

http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/868

My first, perhaps rather naive question is how do I go about ‘installing’ and testing the driver you have written with my Prologix device: is it a simple case of copying the module into the !boot structure and then connecting the device to one of the beagleboard USB sockets?

Sorry to answer so late but I didn’t had time to look into the groups earlier.

Unfortunately the driver works only with USB V0.49 in the moment. Around Christmas I made a small attempt to improve it for the actual USB stack version but didn’t had success already. I hope to sort this out until end of March.

I managed it yesterday to get my FTDI driver working with the actual USB stack. I shall upload the latest sources soon.