An interesting question for USB to Serial

A friend posed the following question: he wants to connect a USB device to the serial port of a PC. Thus, he needs a USB to Serial converter.

In other words, he has a USB device. He needs to connect it to a serial port. In diagrammatic terms,

USB Device >> USB to Serial Adapter >> Serial port of PC

It is NOT
Serial device >> Serial to USB Adapter >> USB port of PC.

Does anyone know of a product anywhere in the world that can do that?

Sounds impossible to me, since the minimum speed of a USB device is 1.5Mbps, and the maximum speed of a serial port is 460Kbps. Thus, it seems to me that if the converter or adapter is available, it would have implemented some form of buffering in itself, a microprocessor and (possibly) an external power source in order to slow down the USB device output, and perform other USB enumeration tasks.
Published Thu, 17 Feb 2005 @ 10:27 AM by chuacw
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Comments

# re: An interesting question for USB to Serial

Tuesday, March 01, 2005 1:26 PM by chuacw

why would anyone want to build something like that?
It's like trying to force a 8 lane freeway into a 2 lane access road and then reconnecting the freeway again?

Regards

Chris

# re: An interesting question for USB to Serial

Tuesday, March 01, 2005 6:50 PM by chuacw

Secure business environment. They cannot change the PCs, but they can attach equipment to it.

Besides, these PCs are running NT 4.0 (still?!) and cannot use USB devices. Though there are USB drivers for NT 4.0, these drivers cause system instability when tested on other NT 4 machines elsewhere (ie, not within the same environment).

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