Can I use a USB-to-serial adapter to talk to my de

Question

I have a Linux virtual machine running on VMWare Fusion (on Mac OS X) that I intend to use as a development environment for an embedded system. Would it be possible for my Linux VM to talk to my embedded system's serial port using a USB-to-serial adapter? Any recommendations for what sort of adapter I should get?

Answer 1

I've found USB serial adaptors to be a bit hit & miss with embedded work. One thing to be aware of is that the buffering tends to work differently from "real" serial ports, and latency of characters through the system can be quite variable. Some embedded development systems (think bootloaders, cheap JTAG probes etc) can be quite sensitive to this and will give timeouts and so on.

Note this doesn't only apply to USB serial adaptors, I've had similar problems with high end multi-port serial cards, but usually with those you can tweak the FIFO / IRQ settings to get something working.