Description
The FTDI friend is a small breakout board specifically designed to convert a USB connection to plain old serial data. These are especially useful for communicating with basic serial devices over USB or programming smaller Arduino products that lack USB connectivity such as the Arduino Mini, Arduino Pro Mini, or Arduino Pro 328. These can be thought of as an alternative to a standard FTDI cable, with a few extra options!
The board is based on the FTDI FT232RL chipset and is manufactured using genuine FTDI chips. There is a USB mini input on one side and a standard 6 pin 0.100″ / 2.54mm breadboard pitch header on the opposite side. This header will plug in just like any FTDI cable and connects all four data lines, power, and ground. The logic level for the data pins and power pin can be adjusted between 3.3V and 5V using solder jumpers on the back. By default the power wire is set to 5VDC while the signal levels are set to 3.3V logic (this should work in the vast majority of 5V / 3.3V systems). The 6th pin on the cable is RTS and as of Arduino IDE v18 this will work perfectly for uploading to Arduino.
