[Coco] DW4/Prolific USB/Xubuntu 13.10 Fail [Solved]

[Joel Ewy]

Well, I ordered a couple of the super cheap USB/Serial adapters that 
Aaron says work for him, and got good results with DW4.  If the problem 
with the Prolific chip is a proliferation of bad clones, then perhaps 
Aaron's source has gotten ahold of the real deal.  I couldn't find where 
Aaron posted the link when I looked for it just now, so I'll re-post for 
any who want to try these out: 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-to-RS232-serial-DB9-Adapter-4-XP-Vista-Win7-Female-Screw-FastShipping-USA-/230911838342?pt=US_Parallel_Serial_PS_2_Cables_Adapters&hash=item35c36b0886

I haven't tested them thoroughly yet, or really checked out the 
performance, but the one I opened does seem to work, which is a lot more 
than I can say for the one I had lying around before.

One little hitch I ran into was that when I tried running the 
configuration wizard it wouldn't detect the serial port, and it wouldn't 
accept the /dev/ttyUSB0 (or just ttyUSB0) port if I typed it in 
manually.  I finally decided just to try it anyway, and it worked.  I 
guess that what was happening is that the server was already grabbing 
the port, which was listed in config.xml, so it wasn't available to be 
discovered or (re-)used by the wizard.  Is that a fair guess?

In any case, these particular cheap, no-name USB/Serial adapters from 
China seem to work reasonably well for DriveWire.  At least they're 
worth the pittance you pay for them as a quick and dirty way to add a 
serial port to a computer with only USB.  Now I need to try it out on 
the Raspberry Pi.

JCE

On 12/25/2013 11:22 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> ...
>
> Finally, while my experience with prolific adapters has been great, there
> are plenty of folks who think they are junk.  Maybe some of them are?  If
> you can connect a to another PC it would be worth confirming you can pass
> data at 115k or whatever rate you use on the FPGA board.  If it works in
> minicom or any terminal program, it will very likely work fine with DW.
>
> Good luck..
>
> On Dec 25, 2013 10:42 PM, "Joel Ewy" <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
>> I'm trying to get DW4.3.30 working in a somewhat new environment with
> poor luck...
> I have one of these USB/Serial thingies.  It's a Prolific -- cheap and
> sucky, but Aaron says they work for him, right?...