Sphere478 wrote on 2021-01-19, 04:42:
Hey, I was reading around and I found a site (then promptly lost it 🤣) but it’s alright cause it was pretty vague. Anyway there was this idea that since no one uses com ports anymore these days and that they are similar and there are bridge chips that it would be possible to use your com ports as usb ports, though likely very slow ones.
I was interested in learning more about this. Does anyone have any experience with this? I think it would be cool to plug into the com ports, and pop out of the back of the computer as usb ports
Bridge chips that allow running a COM port off a computer's USB port are common and require only a driver for the host OS .
AFAIK, bridge chips that work in the opposite direction (add a USB port through a computer's existing COM port) do not exist and, if they did, would require a custom USB stack on the host OS side, which would have to be written from scratch . And assuming a device of this kind was made and software written for it, the 15KB/sec (and many older COM port UART chips won't even handle a fraction of that) or so max speed of a COM port would make it practically useless, IMHO .