USB to serial adapters

As posted elsewere, the Radio Shack USB to serial seems to be one of their only decent products. Install was straightforward ( XP Pro on Toshiba laptop ).

www.racetiming.com

Recent experience has shown that the "smart" USB-Serial adapters are more trouble than they are worth. Kevin Holden at Lynx confirms this. Try to stay away from fancy adapters. Kevin says that the first tip off that the USB adapter will be trouble is that it has LEDs on it.

We went round and round with Targus units last week. They finally worked once the PC was rebooted, the adapter inserted, the adapter removed, and reinserted. The fact that it had to be inserted and reinserted was on page 7 of their flimsy manual. Pretty funny scene as 3 highly trained techs stumped by a stupid adapter that even appeared as legal in Device manager.

Buy the stupid $20.00 unit if available.

I will agree with Allan. I was in need of an extra serial port this weekend for a computer we don't normally use for backup timing and our only choice was a Radio Shack to buy something that might work. I purchased the Radio Shack USB to Serial Port Cable Model: 26-183. We installed the software from the supplied CD and pluged in the cable and it worked right from the start. No problems for two days of racing using Split Second and a TAG Heuer PTB605.

I have had good luck with adapters based on the "Prolific PL-2303" chipset. They are sold under a number of different names, see http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31. The one sold over splitsecond.com is also based on the same chipset. The driver supports com ports over com4 and I have not had any trouble running them over powered usb hubs. You can also change the assigned com port number through the device manager (a reboot is required though)

One annoyance is that it gets assigned a different com port based on the usb port you plug it into. I have my usb hubs covered in brother p-touch stickers that let you know which com port corresponds to which usb port. I over-label all of my equipment so that non-computer savvy helpers won't get themselves into trouble.