Using a standard USB/Serial adapter to communicate with your Arduino or Raspberry Pi is all good when you only have one of them on the desk. The inevitable time will come when you’ll have several devices on your desk all spitting out serial data and all needing their own USB/Serial converter board. This results in cables everywhere, getting in the way and cluttering up your desk. That’s all in the past thanks to this Quad USB/Serial converter board. Just hook it up to your computer with a USB cable and straight away you have your four serial ports.
The chip that makes all of this possible is the FT4232H Quad USB/UART IC made by the infamous FTDI. Each serial port has RX and TX LEDs attached which may seem like a small feature but is a really useful debugging tool. All of the RS-232 control lines are also broken out for each of the serial ports which you don’t see on every USB/Serial converter. You don’t need to use them for most applications but it is nice to have them just in case!
