One quick test for you to do, short pins 2 & 3 on the 9 way D,
as you type in terminal, it should be echoed back to the terminal.
CAUTION +/- 12 volts can be present on the pins of RS232. (more than enough to kill MBED)
Two things from my own experience,
avoid the prolific part, my all time favorate is the FTDI chip set (Never crashes PC, and has best PC drivers ever IMHO)
for all of you i recommend, from Farnell: FTDI TTL-232R-3V3-WE part number 1740365 for £16
It is a little expensive, but this comes with an USB Plug on one end, and TTL (3V3) on the other on bair wires.
or 1740367 FTDI TTL-232R-3V3-PCB
Enjoy
Ceri.
OK, I'm trying to connect my mbed to my pc via p27/p28 as a serial connection.
To connect this I've got a usb-to-serial convertor (Prolific chipset).
I have connected pin 3 (assumed to be tx) of the usb-to-serial to the rx (pin 27). I have connected the ground (pin 5 on usb-to-serial) to gnd on the board. The other pins on the usb-to-serial connector are not connected up at all.
I thought this would be enough to at least receive data (key presses via putty) but it just does not work.
It works fine over the regular usb headed on the board, and all the settings are the same as this in putty (the default values) but nothing is recieved.
I'm guessing there is something fundamentally wrong here (and probably silly) .... can anyone please help me?