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:
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, you can screen into your serial-USB Arduino that is connected via the serial RX/TX pins. I used it to hack a Lidl Zigbee Gateway into a simple Tuya Zigbee Gateway.