FTDI Basic Breakout (5V)

You need USB to serial communications. Oh, yes you do. If you don't, you just aren't trying hard enough. Trust us, when the time comes, you'll be sooo happy you have one of these on hand for talking to your microcontroller.

The fine folks at SparkFun made it easy to talk serial from USB wit this basic breakout board for the FTDI FT232RL USB to serial IC. The pinout the standard FTDI cable layout so it works with Arduino-style boards that need external USB-serial interfaces. 

There is one important difference from the FTDI standard: The DTR pin is brought out where the RTS pin is supposed to be on the FTDI cable. The DTR pin allows an Arduino target to auto-reset when a new Sketch is downloaded. This is a really nice feature to have and allows a sketch to be downloaded without having to hit the reset button. This board will auto reset any Arduino board that has the reset pin brought out to a 6-pin connector.

The pins labeled BLK and GRN correspond to the colored wires on the FTDI cable. The black wire on the FTDI cable is GND, green is CTS. Use these BLK and GRN pins to align the FTDI basic board with your Arduino target.

This board was designed to decrease the cost of Arduino development and increase ease of use (the auto-reset feature rocks!). Arduino Pro boards and LilyPads use this type of connector.

One of the nice features of this board is a jumper on the back of the board that allows the board to be configured to either 3.3V or 5V (both power output and IO level). This board ship default to 5V, but you can cut the default trace and add a solder jumper if you need to switch to 3.3V.