The BriteBlox USB Communicator - USB to TTL RS232 breakout

The USB Communicator board facilitates USB-to-serial communication, allowing you to hook a BriteBlox LED marquee directly to your PC for easy control or talk to your own projects. The 3-option power switch lets you power the boards from this module with the full power of your USB port, or allow 5V power to pass through from an external power source such as our Wall POWAH module, or even utilize the 3.3V power output from the FTDI chip. The 3.3V output is not strong enough to power the BriteBlox Displayboards unless you flash them with a bootloader that supports 3.3V, but you can use it to power your own projects. The USB Communicator also features the ability to reprogram your Displayboards with a new sketch by the standard serial interface, or reprogram plus examine the fuses of any compatible board by ICSP.

And the best part: Plug in a Displayboard on the left or the right side of this USB Communicator, it doesn't matter which! The system is totally modular.

The USB Communicator has been observed to power up to 20 Displayboards at once, so why not just run a really long LED marquee via USB?

This USB Communicator is providing power and data to the 12 Displayboards in this BriteBlox marquee with the help of some jumper cables.

What else do I need?

Well, it helps if you have at least one board worth of our flagship product -- the BriteBlox Displayboard! You can, however, use this as a serial breakout board for all kinds of other projects. It features breakouts for all the serial signals including DCD, DSR, and RI, plus the settings pins for the FTDI FT232RL chip so you can make it behave in any manner documented as attributed to those four "CBUS" pins on that chip.