Part of my reasoning was that I knew that "FTDI" simply stood for the name of the company that makes the USB serial chips.
And indeed that is the case.
Well it turns out I was wrong, I can't seem to get the Chinese one to work (Has anyone had any success with them?) so I guess I wasted a dollar. Boo hoo.
Sour grapes. They work just fine for me. If you bought one for a dollar, then it will be a five-pin version which does not provide for the extra control line. Unfortunately it
is the case that the six pin versions were produced by someone who had
no idea whatsoever what he was doing and brought out the wrong pin. They can however be modified to work perfectly well.
FYI: the Chinese one uses a counterfeit clone of the Prolific PL2303 chip, and does not work with the current version of the Prolific driver, but does work with the older 2004 driver for Vista. I verified it is actually working by shorting the TXD to RXD pins as a loopback, and typing into a terminal program and my characters get echoed back, and the TXD and RXD status lights flash.
So it would appear you
do have the correct driver.
The Chinese one does not have a DTR output to connect to the Arduino and thus reset it as it is about to upload the sketch, but I tried the pressing and holding the reset button on the Arduino and releasing it as the sketch finishes compiling and starts to upload, but could not get the sketch to upload, kept getting the avrdude not in sync error. Tried varying my timing without success.
You most likely have the TXD and RXD pins swapped incorrectly. This is the most common - and simplest error. I presume you are using it with a "Pro Mini". Once you get it right, it will work with the correct timing. Do not press the reset
too quickly after the "Binary sketch size" message appears, about one second seems to be near the mark. Do not press it
until that message appears, just causes finger fatigue; just press it briefly. Windoze appears to be significantly slower than Linux.
Lesson learned: Spend a few extra bucks for a real FTDI breakout board.
Only if you are averse to real experimentation, that is.
