Use RS232 serial evaluation boards on USB port

NXP provides various development boards for systems supporting ISO/IEC14443 based contactless reader technology. Products are for example MFRC663, MFRC522, MFRC523, MFRC52x, MFRD522, MFRD523, MFRD52x, PN512 and PN532.

The development boards make use of a serial RS232 interface which is connected to a PC to execute scripts or other PC based software to control the functionality of the contactless reader IC.

More and more it is found that modern PC's are not equipped by default with the RS232 interface.

A standard interface available on most PCs is the USB interface. Converters that are converting the signals of a USB interface to RS232 signals are available in the market.

In practice we have found that not all USB /RS232 converters are working without problems. Reason for this problems could be that the designers of this interfaces need to find a compromise to fit most applications, so that it does not fit very well to the use case of transferring contactless data.

View the PDF document for more information.

Originally published by NXP Semiconductors at www.nxp.com as "Using the RS232 serial evaluation boards on a USB port".