USB To Serial Converter Issues

[Rapt0r9]

I am pretty sure that this may have been addressed before, however, we have been have incredibly long download times using a Belkin USB to Serial Converter. I have read that the download times for other teams have been up to 2 - 3 minutes, but last night when I timed a download it took 40 minutes. We no longer have access to a computer which has a DB-9 port, so this is our only option. The USB ports are USB 2.0 and the Baud Rate was set to 115200. I have no idea why this is happening and have been trouble shooting for the past couple hours. Has this happened to anybody else, or does anybody have a potential solution for our extremely long download times? Thanks.

[kE7JLM]

We had the same problem, use this. http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=product&Item=GUC232A



it works great!!

[Kingofl337]

Use the vex cable that will net the better results.
If your laptop has PCMCIA that runs like a internal serial port.

[pheadxdll]

When I had my old laptop with a native COM port, downloads used to take a matter of seconds- Now they take about 2-3 minutes with both of these USB to SERIAL convertors I've tried. Is 2-3 minutes for programming normal for you guys?

Alex

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by pheadxdll

When I had my old laptop with a native COM port, downloads used to take a matter of seconds- Now they take about 2-3 minutes with both of these USB to SERIAL convertors I've tried. Is 2-3 minutes for programming normal for you guys?

Unfortunately, yes. When our programming laptop's serial port got fried a few years ago and we started using a USB converter, the extra time became pretty annoying. We learned to double-check everything before compiling to make sure we got the best value for our download time. Before, we'd been tossing simple changes in and trying them out. Now, we think them through a bit more closely.

[random_guy7531]

while ive never had a bad experience with my usb to serial on my laptop, i can say that usually problems can occur when the actual converter is not usb 2.0 compatible. while the computer may have usb 2.0 ports, sometimes the converter is not usb 2.0 compatible (i learned this from the lonestar regional, as another team had the same problem). Our team doesnt use them very often, as the company laptops the mentors have all have db9 ports as do the desktops. Either way, we write so much code that it takes a good 1-2 minutes to load it all even on a db-9 port, so i dont even want to think about using a converter, esp. one that isnt usb2.0.