Aten UC2324 - USB to serial hub
We're today having a look at a computer accessory that will also doubles as an accessory for our electronics department while creating our new articles series around electronics.
The product we're looking at is the USB-to-serial RS232 Hub, UC2324 made by Aten. As the product name says, this product connects to a USB port on your computer and gives you a hub of four RS232 ports.
You might wonder, why the *dirty word* would you want RS232 ports on a computer today? Are you from the stone-age or something? Well, not me personally but the technology more or less is.
The RS232 communication has been used in products since way back and many might remember these ports from the modem time, when you had a modem connected to your computer not by a RJ45 interface, but a regular COM port.
Some of you might also remember some speeds used on this communication port, such as 9 600bps (9.6Kpbs), 14 400 (14.4Kbps), 28 800 (28.8Kbps), 38 400 (38.4Kbps) and 56 000 (56Kbps).
Enourmous speeds, at that time in history. When I started using internet the speed was up in 14.4K, just after that we upgraded to 28.8K and some year later we finally got up to 56K modem speed. What a difference that was! Sure, but after that we had broadband internet and the speed just went out of control ;)
Today we're talking about speeds, just crazy written 10 000 000bps, 24 000 000bps and 100 000 000, to not forget the 1000 000 000bps which converts into the more understandable 10Mbps, 24Mbps, 100Mpbs and 1Gbit speeds. To our office we have a 24Mbit downstream with a 10Mbit upstream.
We all can certainly also recall moments when we tear our hair out because the Internet is so slow!?! Slow, perhaps the speed went down a few Mbps and we get crazy.
Anyhow, the UC2324 from Aten works with the same kind of interface we used for our old modems. Still you might wonder why? Well, many products today are based on this extremely simple and very, very, very useful communication. Not to mention that you're in contact with this very same communication every single day.
I'm going to let you think What!? for a moment and think what you might get in contact with every day that you don't even think about.
Time's up!
Every day when you go to the grocery store, disable your intruder alarm, login with your RFID badge or perhaps swipe your ID card at work, you have the possibility to get in contact with RS232 communication. This is because it is such a simple way to communicate between electronic products.
For example, in the grocery store they most probably have a laser-scanner of some sort, most of these are still based on RS232 products while some newer have started to communicate over USB, but this is still a really small part of the products out there.
Ok, so you might want to have one com-port connected to your computer, but why even more? Well many companies have several different RS232 products that needs to be connected to a computer, so a hub is very beneficial instead of having for example more than one computer.
In our case, as we've been kindly given this product, we're going to use it while creating our article series for electronics. This enables us to connect for example a programmer on one port, a communication line on another port and perhaps a debug communicator on another port.
I know, you might come up with yet another question similar to.. Why start using RS232 communication when we have USB, Ethernet and other technologies? Well, Ethernet for example requires lots of overhead code, which means that just to send a proper packet which for example a switch, hub or even a computer can understand, you need lots of extra code that might not fit for a small microcontroller such as an Atmel AVR or Microchip PIC.
Furthermore you most probably need something on the other end, unless you're making a webinterface in your microcontroller, that can receive the information sent by the sender.
USB is more or less the same, not really much overhead in the microcontroller, but depending on your application for the end product you're developing you might need a driver, perhaps even a specialized driver. If you're then going to broaden the usage of your product to enable Windows, Linux and Macintosh users to use your products, you need to create different drivers.
So, why RS232? Well because the only thing we need is a really small code in our microcontroller, more or less only an extremely small terminal program on your computer and you're good to go. Terminal software is also available on every single platform you can think of. Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Unix, Android, iOS, BSD and all sort of names you can think of.
Therefore it is a great pleasure to have the US2324 for test from Aten.
This first page became a whole novel of just history and why would anyone use RS232, but it gives you an idea of why we are testing a product offering something you thought was long gone and dead.
So on next page we'll continue to take a look at the UC2324.
