USB to serial mystified

dwbowen

Hello All,

I am using:
windows 7 starter laptop
Basic Stamp 2px on a USB board of education Rev C
Basic Stamp 2 Homework board Rev C and Parallax USBto232
BASIC Stamp Editor v2.4.2.

I have used this machine regularly for almost a year to program both of these stamps with no problems. Quite suddenly yesterday I attempted to upload a program to the BS 2px and I received the error message "No usable serial ports found". I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers downloaded directly from the FTDI and parallax sites several times with no luck. I also ran the FTClean program that I found in another forum thread on this same topic and this does not seem to be working either. When I attempt to install the driver I sometimes receive an error message that says that the driver was not installed properly. I follow the prompts of Windows install wizard and still it fails to install properly. Also after attempting to install the driver and opening the Basic Stamp editor I pull down the Directive menu and no ports appear.

I would like to attempt reduce the latency timer settings as suggested in the troubleshooting guide but it appears that the driver needs to be installed correctly to do that and for some reason this is not happening.

It is important to note that the stamp was running a program that was sending debug messages but I have tried installing the driver with the stamp powered and not powered and neither works. Both stamps are connected to wall wart power supplies so dead batteries are not the issue either. I am completely at a loss and extremely frustrated. Has anybody out there had a similar experience or have any advice?

thank you,

Mike Green

You should be able to install the FTDI drivers from a clean copy from FTDI's or Parallax's website, particularly if you delete it first. I'm not aware of any problems with the existing driver.

Yes, the driver has to be installed to be able to adjust the latency settings.

It's odd that both USB to serial adapters failed (the one on the BOE and the USB-to-Serial). That suggests that the problem is with something from the USB cable to the laptop. Try a different USB cable. Make sure your USB ports work properly.

Mike G

Check the device manager [ Control Panel\System and Security\System ]and make sure that you do not have any conflicts. It's a little weird that the virtual serial port stopped working for no particular reason. Do you anything else connected to the USB port? Maybe something new?

dwbowen

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. Problem solved with a complete system restore. Restored windows to where it was 3 days before I began having problems. Still kinda frustrating how buggy these adaptors/drivers can be. Anyway its all good now.

cheers!

vaclav_sal

After using PC from the humble IBM PC I have experienced numerous cases when the serial port (COM) would quit responding to Windows OS. Especially when two applications attempted to share the port.
Amost 100% of the time the solution was to remove the COM port from the Windows, not the driver, power down or remove ( that is impractical nowadays) COM card from the PC. Then power up and then let OS find the COM device and reinstall it.

If you device is actually serial to COM “adapter” and not true USB it is still possible that this may be the solution.

The original COM used UART to convert the serial to parallel data and I think Windows OS ( or application using COM port) never got a real grip on this interface serial / parallel hardware.

I would question the need to uninstall the driver and reinstall it. But if it worked, so what.

Franklin

I would question the need to uninstall the driver and reinstall it.

In modern PCs with onboard hardware it is the closest you can get to removing the com port card.