For a small hacking project i needed to connect to a device via it's serial interface. Not having a USB to serial interface i started looking around the internet to buy one. After some thought, i started looking through my electronics and realized that many devices already have serial interfaces that can connect via USB. The most obvious one, being my Arduino.
After some Googling, i found two suggestions:
- Connect the reset pin with the ground pin and it works.
- Upload a sketch to accomplish the same.
I went with the second one, not wanting to risk any malfunction of my Arduino. Long story short, just upload this sketch in the Arduino IDE:
void setup(){ pinMode(0,INPUT); pinMode(1,INPUT); } void loop(){ }
After this, connect only the RX/TX pins on your Arduino. Remember that on the device you want to connect, the order is reversed.
You can now screen into your serial-USB Arduino that is connected via the serial RX/TX pins. I used it to hack a Lidl Zigbee Gateway.