Most people in the general public have no need for direct serial connections — there is a reason that computers haven’t commonly included serial ports in decades. But there is still a lot of equipment that relies on serial communication and so working with that equipment is difficult when you can’t find a modern computer with a compatible port. Sadly, the typical USB-to-serial adapters on the market are very unreliable. That’s why Excamera created TermDriver and it was a good solution. Now they’re preparing to release the TermDriver 2 and it has all kinds of great improvements.
TermDriver 2 is a compact, self-contained device capable of establishing serial communication with other devices, with baud rates from 1200 to 2Mbit. It accepts both 3.3V and 5V, and it has both DTR and CTS control signals. Everything else about a connection protocol is configurable, so TermDriver 2 should work with the vast majority of serial devices made in the last 50 years.
But while TermDriver 2 can communicate with serial devices all on its own, it is really intended to act as a USB-to-serial adapter between a modern PC and the serial device. With a 32KB input buffer, it can handle quite a lot of overflow. And because it maintains the serial connection directly, timing isn’t an issue. Those two factors solve virtually all of the reliability problems that people tend to encounter with typical USB-to-serial adapters.
That unique functionality also makes TermDriver 2 capable of showing an emulated terminal all on its own. That appears on a 1.3” IPS display with a resolution of 240×240 pixels, which is built right into the device. It displays 60×23 characters and has full ANSI escape code support, including color information.
That’s all possible because Excamera built TermDriver 2 around a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, which has hardware serial ports and plenty of memory and processing power for the task. The RP2040 is on a small custom PCB, with just a handful of other components. It has female headers on one side for the serial connection and a micro USB port on the other side for the connection to the PC.
It isn’t clear if Excamera will release PC software for sending commands or data over the serial connection, or if TermDriver 2 will simply echo anything send over the USB connection (as you could do with the original TermDriver).
If TermDriver 2 interests you, you can sign up for updates on the Crowd Supply page.