USB to serial cable connections

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Alright everyone, so today we’re talking about something a little bit opposite of what we’ve talked about before: USB to serial cable connections. Recently I wrote a post called USB RS232 conversions, wherein we discussed how to connect a USB device to an old laptop that might actually just have an old RS232 serial port. Today we’re going to go a little bit the other way and talk about how to use serial-based peripherals with your modern laptop that utilizes USB to the maximum extent possible. You probably have already noticed that your newer laptop probably doesn’t have an RS232 serial port; that’s because most new laptops don’t need them. Peripherals these days are almost never require a serial cable connection. It’s just unheard of unless you’re using something really old.

But hey, sometimes we might need to use a dot-matrix printer, right? For what, exactly? Heck if I know…that’s your own business. That being said, you can’t just expect to give up on using it if you really need it for a project. You need to find a way for it to interface with your computer. So, the USB to serial port cable adapter was born. This allows a laptop with a standard USB port to interface with that old peripheral where it wasn’t able to before. This is great news, right?

Well, that’s not the full story. While you can attach the new laptop and old printer just fine, there comes to problem of drivers. Drivers don’t always exist on modern operating systems for peripherals that are really old, so you may run into some problems there.

Windows XP and Vista are actually pretty good at recognizing strange and unusual hardware (the one thing Windows is good at?), so there is a chance that you can connect the two together and have them work just fine. If not, you may need to go to the peripheral manufacturer’s website (if they still exist) and see if they possibly support that peripheral still. With a little digging you may be able to make this happen. If neither of those work, you can search the search engines to see if someone has made any third-party drivers. Barring this, well, you may just be out of luck! USB to serial cables are great tools, but unless you have the drivers for what you’re working with, it just won’t work.

USB to serial converter cable adapters aren’t expensive, though. If it doesn’t work, heck, you’re out $20. It’s not a bad idea to try this method out before you go digging out your old 286.