Has anyone tried using the SC16IS750 I2C/SPI-to-UART IC with the mBed? Sparkfun includes one on their wiFly board and they sell a separate breakout board for it for $15... Looks like a perfect solution for adding serial ports without the hassle and excessive pin usage of the max3100... The SC16IS750 uses either SPI or I2C... I'm pretty interested in using I2C, but SPI would be acceptable... If anyone has any experience, I'd love to hear!!

Sparkfun sells the device here.... http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9981

Someone seems to have written a library for the arduino... And I'm not sure I'm proficient enough to translate that over to the mBed without some loss of sanity... That library is listed in the comments on the product page here... http://inmcm-hdl.googlecode.com/files/SC16IS750_Test.zip

Any help would be awesome!!

Hi Mark,

I have a board with six of its sister parts, the SC16IS762. We needed 12 serial ports and these worked like a charm. I'm using these with SPI and the MBED can handle 12 channels of serial at 115200 believe it or not. If you need any help with them, let me know.

This is a image of the board while I was load testing it: /media/uploads/ramos289/img_1957.jpg

Hi Brian, Wow! Thanks for the quick reply!! Looks like it's a great way to go then! I was starting to worry there for a bit before finding this part... I've got a GPS, wiFly, and a servo controller as well as a few I2C and SPI devices which fills up the ports... I just found it tonight, so I'm going to place an order and get going on it.... Thanks for the encouraging word... You wouldn't happen to have any code you can share, would ya? ;)

That's a nice board you have going there... Looks like a lot of work went into that!

Thanks!!

Would anyone happen to have a library for this device? =)

Hi Mark,

I had a chance to touch on the SC16IS750 last week.
I made a tiny test code to try TX on the chip.

This program can transmit short text data (upto 64 bytes which is the FIFO size inside of the SC16IS750) only. So it may need to extend for handling bigger data and RX.
I will be happy if this code can be your good starting point of writing your library :)

Execution result can be seen like picture below.
This sample is operating 9600 baud but I confirmed that it can be operated 115200 too.

Hey Todd, thanks so much!! I will take a look at that asap.. I'm sure it will be a great start. I'm gearing up to get this device working as it's a pretty important part of my project..and I just received the new batch of hardware that'll use it.. Got to love the Saleae Logic...!! =)

Thanks again, and I will update my progress and would love to hear any from you as well! -mark