Keyspan USB to serial adapter issues

Sorry James, I didn’t give you the link:

As to the link, that looks exactly like the cable I use for most things. I think it was the folks at adafruit.com that first coined the term “ftdi friend” as the name for exactly that cable. It’s not any different than any FTDI chip based adaptor only easier to use for this sort of thing than the RS232 versions which are more common. Then they, or others, started producing the other module that is what I linked to, same chip and things but you have to use an external usb cable. I prefer the cable you linked to actually, but you can’t move a jumper on the ones that are molded into the cable. I think that many settings can be set by FTDI’s utility app as well though I’ve never had to play with that. I know you can turn on things like inverting the serial output and change the USB device codes and such. Assuming that they haven’t locked that last one out which I’m pretty sure they do for most things as the drivers won’t recognize them if you change it.

What you describe of bridging the MAX232 sounds correct to me. You generally can’t hurt a 5v ttl with a 3.3v signal, but you might damage the receiver in the adaptor if it was 3.3v and you send it back 5v data pulses. I’m fairly sure that a 3.3v FTDI is 5v tolerant but I’d want to check the data sheet to be sure. I’ve used a simple voltage divider to connect 5v FTDI adaptors to 3.3v devices and the 5v adaptor had no problem seeing the 3.3v data from the device so no upconverting was needed on the receive side for the FTDI. You definitely do need the MAX232 to go from ttl to rs232 though. None of that matters for your application I don’t think. As you mention above it should only need ground and tx/rx. Pin outs for that cable are available everywhere. I put a programming header designed for those cables on almost all my arduino or other based home automation projects as it’s just so much easier than trying to buy FTDI chips and put them on the board. They don’t have a through hole version for easy soldering and of course a 6 pin header is a lot cheaper :wink: So that all sounds perfect.

One other thing to keep in mind if you do need the 3.3v variant at some time. The one I’ve got do output 3.3v logic, but the vcc pin from it is still powered from the USB at 5v, so don’t use it to power the 3.3v device directly as it will blow things up. I just ordered a short run of some ESP32 based PWM dimmer boards I’m going to use for LED lighting around the house and they all run at 3.3v. I had to leave the power lead disconnected on the board so that wouldn’t blow it up. Have to apply power from another source in order to program, but thats OK. And then yesterday morning I decided to make up 2 more of the boards and managed to fill the mosfet spots with 5v regulators instead :wink: I shouldn’t have stored the tubes of both things in the same drawer as they look so much alike :wink: Or I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry yesterday :wink: But I’ve got half an hours of wasted time desoldering on my scheduled today!

The first home automation system I ever saw was in an article I think in Byte magazine in about 1976, I was 6 years old at the time but I thought it was the coolest thing ever :wink: He had an X10 interface on it. My own first HA system ran on a Mac SE I think. I still have one here that boots and runs but I don’t do anything but look at it once in a while :wink: We still have users of the original classic macos software that popup on our radar when the quadra in their closet dies and they have to replace it and want to upgrade.

I monitor electricity use by having an arduino watch the ir calibration pulses that my smart meter outputs from it’s front panel with each kwh used. I monitor the hot water heaters with just a 1-wire temp sensor on the input and output pipes so I know if the kids have gotten up in the morning and gotten in the shower or not :wink: Thats proven useful on days an alarm doesn’t go off. I also know that the water heaters don’t cycle enough without use to really save much money replacing with tankless ones. I also know that a tankless hot water on the kids rooms would cost me a fortune as the only reason either teenager ever gets out of the shower is when the hot water starts to run out :wink: I don’t measure water usage yet but I’ve got a pulse output meter device that is going to go inline with the main water line to the house the next time I need to have a plumber in for any other reason. I have also put the same 1wire sensors on either side of the HVAC units so I can measure temperature rise or fall across the heater and coil. If they get low on gas or something else goes wrong a checkup script that runs a few minutes after any cycle starts will notice that the temperature gradient isn’t enough and send me a message to get it fixed before it dies completely. Lots of fun things like that :wink: I have sensors here for current and pressure I keep meaning to put on the blower motors in them to try to see if I can track how dirty the filters are getting by watching for increased current draw or decreased pressure on the intake side but haven’t gotten around to that yet. So many fun projects! We have one user who has every part of his ground source heat pump to hydronic heating system run by the software. All the temp sensors that control what loop pump gets run and for how long. It’s a very complicated system and I’m impressed! Where I live now it’s mostly AC that we need so I don’t get a fancy heat system like that to run. Though I did throw together my own thermostat for the main system with an arduino and an xBee to talk to the software when the very expensive and very fancy communicating thermostat I had got struck by lightning. That has been running the main HVAC here for going on 8 years now and I haven’t had any trouble with it so am not going to replace it anytime soon. I just love all the projects for such things. I’m going to have a look at that chip you are talking to as our users cannot get enough of any kind of GPIO things. Though if I have to write one more plugin for a new wifi color capable light bulb I’m going to scream, there are enough to choose from already! :slight_smile: Keep in touch and let me know how that adaptor works!

One other fun thing about the FTDI based adaptors is that they are supported out of the box on the Raspberry Pi. You can setup a $10 pi zero w and share the serial port over wifi with it. It’s like an extremely cheap wifi to serial adaptor! Or, they have a 3.3v serial port already on board which you can share also. Or if you get the larger pi’s or connect a cheap USB/Ethernet adaptor to the Zero you can make an ethernet to serial adaptor.

and if you connect it to an esp8266 you have a complete $5 ethernet to serial adapter …

James, this is my HVAC monitoring system :

with its 4 probes

I’ve done enough struggling with both the Keyspan USB to serial Adapter the 3.3 and 5 volt issue and went ahead and ordered several options including the cable with True 5V / 3.3V / 2.8V / 1.8V CMOS drive output a TTL input, Bi-directional Logic Level and Shifter Converter Module 5V to 3.3V For Arduino, a STM32F103C8T6 Minimum System Development Board Module (for fun) an FTDI USB to TTL Serial Adapter Module for Arduino Mini Port FT232RL 3.3V 5.5V and a ESP-32S ESP32 Development Board 2.4GHz Dual-Mode WiFi+Bluetooth Antenna Module (more fun). If I can’t get connected with this stuff I’m up in trouble. Now for the wait.

James, what you are doing is amazing and at one time, actually for year, my passion. I will share a little more with you in another post about what I felt was important for energy conservation and low energy bills. Thanks Jean for your ideas. Makes me want to update my home automation system but that’s way deep at this stage of the game. If COVID-19 axes my traveling the world to DJ and dance Argentine Tango, I may have time. You guys and gals are the best, Thanks.

Thought for the day James; I’m close to starting a project to build a miniature teardrop expandable trailer to pull behind a Spider Can Am three wheeler. Do I need some home automation (-: It will have a solar panel.

Julia, I looked at the output of the WIZ 232 controller with a serial terminal and got the same results. To me the Keyspan adapter seems to be a POS.

But that requires a bunch of code on the ESP to do it :wink: I can do it with the pi gpio stuff with no code at all for most things :wink:

[quote=487349:@Clifford Coulter]Thought for the day James; I’m close to starting a project to build a miniature teardrop expandable trailer to pull behind a Spider Can Am three wheeler. Do I need some home automation (-: It will have a solar panel.

[/quote]

I suspect that the word “need” includes both measurable real world advantages but also, as it does with me, includes a huge amount of personal preference and need to know what is actually happening :wink: If so then YES you absolutely need it :slight_smile:

Not that I have anything against the ESP chips! I love them! I actually sell a kit right now for a wifi enabled 1-wire temp sensor that runs on an ESP-01 on a board that you can put together with all through hole components. I run my house with dozens of them on custom boards that I haven’t gotten around to actually selling yet but that will come soon :slight_smile: Currently struggling with the still not quite complete API for the ESP32 not to mention just being able to solder the darned things to the board since their pin pitch is just ever so slightly smaller than the best headers you can buy to attach such a thing. If they made it just 2 or 3mm longer I could use human solderable headers to build things with it, alas, it pretty much has to be surface mount now. I’m actually slacking off testing new Xojo versions while I finish porting some firmware from older ESP9266 chips to newer ESP32 chips :wink: Loving most of it, only frustrated with I find things out like the fact that their current Blue Tooth LE implementation wastes almost a meg of my firmware space. I wanted to add a feature to the boards that would turn on and off a presence unit in the home automation software if your phone or other device was within range of the ESP32. Unfortunately that makes the firmware too big to fit on even a 4 meg device if you want to do upgrades without having the person purchase a programming cable and setup the Arduino IDE. So that will have to be a separate product at a different time. Or I could upgrade to 6 or 8 meg memory chips, but nobody wants to pay that premium unfortunately :wink:

these helps a lot to soldier the esp32
https://www.ebay.com/itm/5pcs-ESP32-ESP32S-IO-Adapter-Base-Board-Pinboard-Converter-With-4-Row-Pins-For/313040421575
I use the same for esp8266, I build a programmer-debugger with it.

But I can’t sell something as a kit that requires that :slight_smile: I could make my own daughter card, but if I have to solder the chip to it then it’s no different than soldering it to the board proper before I ship it. This is the previous iteration of the board :slight_smile: 6 channels of PWM and 16 1-wire devices and 6 GPIO, the final board which is at the fab now has 10 GPIO and a smaller pitch removable header at the top. I just installed 2 of these test devices in my wifes library and we will see if the ESP32 is better at staying on the wifi than the esp8266 versions this has finally replaced :slight_smile: It will be 2 more weeks before I get the short run back from the fab but I am fairly confident these are working well now and I love everything about the ESP32 except for the bluetooth stack which is so huge. I am currently finalizing the GPIO classes to support everything the chip can do and some other things like pulse counters that I plan to use but it’s looking pretty good so far. Then I just need to write plugins for it for other home automation software packages other than just the one I write to extend the audience :slight_smile: I also need to do that for the already mentioned cheaper and more limited 1-wire wifi adaptor. Which means I’ll need to brush up on my Lua for one platform I want to support and the others are all python which is the same as ours for plugins so while the API is totally different at least I don’t have to learn a new language. Yes, the surface mount soldering is sloppy in the pictured device. This is one I accidentally reverse biased because of a faulty bench supply which blew it up so I had to desolder the ESP32 and put on a new one. This is also one of the ones I put all 5v regulators onto the board instead of mosfets! So those are desoldered and re-soldered as well. Did I mention yet that you shouldn’t store 2 different kinds of TO-220 devices in the same drawer? I must have :slight_smile: So there is another iteration after this which passed the final testing but for which I don’t have a board to show you yet. So close! I’m going back to finalize at least one more piece of the firmware before dinner :slight_smile:

What do you use your 16 1-wire devices for?

and what do you switch with the mosfets ?