Important

The first production run, as pictured, have pinout silkscreen missing. A quick start guide with pinout will be shipped with them instead. This issue will be fixed in the second production run. The first production run have about 30 boards total.

The second production run sports a different design and layout, and will be posted as a different product (albeit the same purpose and even model number). New design M180v2 coming soon!

The number indicated by "number in stock" represents number of fully assembled boards.

Fused USB to UART adapter

This is yet another USB to UART adapter, or is it?

Highlights

• USB to UART adapter with SparkFun FTDI compatible pinout, drop-in replacement of your SparkFun modules.
• CH340G chipset, plug and play on Windows 7+, OS X Yosemite and Linux, and immune to either FTDIgate or Prolific fake chip ban.
• 500mA polyfuse on the USB power line, no more catastrophic "oops" moments.
• Through-hole USB Type B socket, almost impossible to break off.
• Pads for adding a series capacitor (0805-size) to the DTR line for your Arduino-on-breadboard projects.

Story of creation

This project is created out of my own necessity: I had a few dodgy FT232RL and PL2303-based USB to UART modules, and the recent Prolific driver update and FTDIgate killed them. However the one of my friends' MCS-51 development board did not suffer from this plague of drivers disabling devices, and it is based on this CH340G chipset.

I bought a few of those CH340G chips (which are an order of magnitude or two cheaper than both FT232RL and PL2303 by the way) and initial breadboard testing was a great success, with one problem: the internal 3.3V regulator is a little bit problematic. After I threw in an AMS1117 regulator I got it into stable operation for a few days nonstop, feeding GPS module data into my server, all while running on a breadboard.

I did have one mishap with the breadboard though: I was being a fool and connected a chip in reverse, shorting out the power rails on the USB port. The short circuit current draw immediately upset my MacBook's USB port and caused it to be shut down. (Thanks Apple for the superior protection circuitry, should this happened while it is connected to my years-old Lenovo desktop it will definitely let the magic smoke out of my chip and probably take out the computer's motherboard too) I decided to make sure whenever USB power is used on my further projects it is definitely fused.

During this test while minding other projects, I snapped the Micro-USB jack on my Arduino Leonardo clone, took the traces with it and damaged the board beyond repair. A sad me had to take out my hot air gun and disassemble the Leonardo just to recover the parts, and swear not to use those easily damaged jacks on my projects ever, especially those jacks that will subject to lots of wear and tear like USB.

Here comes my design, a USB to UART adapter based on the CH340G chipset, with the same SparkFun pinout, an extra-durable through-hole USB Type B socket, and a fused power rail.

Hacks

You can hack this board for your own purposes!

• On the bottom of the board, I have provided a 0805-sized pad for a series capacitor if you are building an Arduino-on-breadboard project. Just cut the trace between the pads and solder your capacitor there and you are good to go.
• If you want 3.3V operation, you can modify the board into doing this. The two thick traces next to the crystal is 5V and 3.3V rails. Cut the 5V trace (closer to the edge of the board) to the CH340G chip and solder a wire from the regulator output (tab) to CH340G pin 16 to make the board operate in 3.3V logic.

About me

I am Max, a college student major in computer engineering and dabbles in electronics engineering. This is one of my just-for-fun spare time projects.

This board is hand assembled by myself. Made in Shanghai with love, it will not be your one-hang-low Shenzhen crap.

Model numbers:

• M180-RF05 (with 500mA polyfuse)
• M180-RF1 (with 1.1A polyfuse)
• M180-RF2 (with 2A polyfuse)

Coming soon: M180v2 boards