My goal is a very basic one: I want to communicate from my microcontroller to my PC/phone via RS232.
I bought a TTL/RS232 converter like this.
And since my PC does not have a RS232 port I am using a RS232/USB cable like this.
I did the setup to my best of knowledge, but when I connect the USB end of the cable to my PC, it is not recognized as a serial device.
Therefore my question:
At what point should my device be recognized as a serial device (COMx) on a Windows PC? Would powering the TTL/RS232 converter be sufficient or does the microcontroller need to send something specific or just anything at all?
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My setup and what I have done and tried so far:
The microcontroller I use for testing is a NodeMCU ESP8266 module.
I connected it to the converter like this:
GND --- GND
VCC --- 5V / 3.3V (which both should work with the converter module)
RX --- TX
TX --- RX
And then I hooked that up to my PC with the RS232/USB cable.
The schematic that came with the converter looks like this (I noticed however that the actual hardware I got does not have a 4x2 header):
There is plenty of code out there for writing data to a serial connection with Arduino. I tried writing to the hardware serial and also a SoftSerial with two safe pins on the ESP controller. I don't want to go into detail here, as long as I lack such basic understanding of the problem^^.
Sadly, I do not own an oscilloscope to watch the converter output.
Thanks for any pointers! :)