I am creating some fun Arduino projects with my own PCB design. Problem is that I need to communicate with the computer somehow (via USB). But I don't have and FTDI chip - reason for this is that I have no experience with SMD soldering (and the FTDI chips are realy small) and they are not cheap either. So is it possible to communicate with computer without actualy using the FTDI chip? I don't need programming - just plain old serial communication.
Cause I have quite a few knocking around the house for other projects, I use a Nokia DKU-5 USB cable clone, They cost around £3 off E-Bay. Cause they are clones the colour of the leads often differ your best chopping off the nokia plug and getting out your multimeter to check the wiring, but the version I have around the house are RED=RX BLUE=TX (cause you will have to swap these when connecting it to the arduino) and ORANGE=GND. These 3 give me serial comms and let me upload to the Arduino bootloader but you have to manually hit the reset button, but if you wanted auto reset you could open up the USB end and connect DTR too 
SIDE NOTE: oh. and SMD soldering isn't that hard, just get some solder braid, some cheap SMD and make up a practise PCB to work on your skills, you will find its not as hard as you think
For some special applications I have connected RS232 devices (looked from Arduino point of view):
The RCV using a 47k Ohms resistor
The XMT using a 1K Ohms resistor (this however just to feed my paranoia)
There are theoretical reasons to believe it should work; there is practical evidence that it has worked .
But note that I do not really recommend this!
You can calm down your paranoia even more by a standard diode between ground and Arduino RCV (yes, exactly that direction!).
As all signals are now inverted WRT RS232 standard you have to software invert them before. The NewSoftSerial does this fine (3rd paramer in declaration).
I know that some Arduino compatibles do not use FTDI chip for USB/Serial communications.
This one (Error, Electronic & Electronics Components Depot United States) uses software USB/Serial communication and thus eliminated the need for the FTDI chip.
This Soft-USB seems to become a hype
But such a thing can never be Arduino compatible.
It can IMHO become a killer with a nice small operating system. Such a board needs not really run @12 Mhz (this just simplifies the timing) - 20 Mhz would also work...)
FTDI chips are about 4EUR a piece which is quite high price. But the main problem here is that they are SMD. While SMD soldering isn't that hard - it still isn't easy - even harder with the FTDI chip.
Sadly RS232 isn't something that I can use because Macs don't have serial ports. If they had them I would simply use schematic from this:
After some reasearch I found this:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1204833437/0
I just bought three DKU-5 cables and it is working. Thanks for the information! This is the easyest solution of my problem - cheaper than FTDI too. I can't upload a sketch but sending/recieving serial data is working nicely.
I tryed that many times but it didn't work. Maybe because I am using arduino connected to a USB port of different computer (because of power) and it may interfear with serial transfer.