Note: These use genuine FTDI chips, either Adafruit purchase them or they are manufactured to Adaruit's specifications with the requirement of genuine FTDI chips 10/22/14 - read more.

Long gone are the days of parallel ports and serial ports. Now the USB port reigns supreme! But USB is hard, and you just want to transfer your every-day serial data from a microcontroller to computer. What now? Enter the FTDI Friend!

The FTDI Friend is a tweaked out FTDI FT232RL chip adapter. Frstly, it can provide power to your project and there are 4 signal lines for sending data back and forth. But secondly, the Friend can do much more! For example, you can change the signal and power lines to be either 3.3V or 5V. Arduino-derivatives and XBees use the RTS line for programming but what if you need that DTR line? Its there for you.
By default, this has been setup so that the 6th pin is RTS (as of Arduino IDE v18 this will work perfectly for uploading to 'inos), the power wire is +5V and the signal levels are 3.3V (they are 5V compliant, and should work in the vast majority of 3.3V and 5V signal systems).

And of course, Adafruit have included a little extra - in this case its the extra-long headers that you can use to plug it into a breadboard. There are also blinkies, 2 red & green LEDs already on the board that pulse when serial is sent or received.

In a pinch, you can even use it to program AVRs (its a bit slow but works!)

Features

• Genuine FTDI FT232RL chip
• Data transfer rates from 300 baud to 3 Mbaud (RS422, RS485, RS232) at TTL levels.
• 128 byte receive buffer and 256 byte transmit buffer utilising buffer smoothing technology to allow for high data throughput.

Useful Links

An in depth tutorial for the FTDI Friend

The FTDI FT232RL datasheet 

The schematic/layout files at GitHub