Anyone have any recommendations on a good rs232-to-usb converter. There are a lot out there and from the looks of it some are hit or miss.
Good driver support is a must.
Electronic – RS232-to-USB Converter
rs232serialusb
Related Solutions
No, but you could plug the mouse into a USB to PS/2 converter which will make the mouse switch into synchronous serial mode. You would need a matching mini-DIN socket fed with 5V but decoding the data should be fairly straightforward. See here for the wiring.
UPDATE
I just tried this with a couple of new mice and they worked OK. As an afterthought - remembering that PS/2 mice work in asynchronous mode with a PS/2 to DA9 adapter - I tried cascading USB => PS2 => Serial adapters (with external power grafted-in). Needless to say, USB mice don't support legacy async serial mode (well it was worth a shot!).
Driver issues aside the main disadvantage of USB to serial converters ports that I'm aware of is increased latency. Some embedded devices, wireless modems, device programmers and the like often use the flow control lines such as DTR and CTS for non-standard purposes. They may not work if they are timing critical or transitions are required in between a sequence of data. I've encountered several devices like that, mainly older designs from when RS232 was more popular and always implemented as a standard UART.
Technically the USB driver stack also introduces some additional overhead and can cause some issues with old DOS applications. But neither of those is much of an issue with modern PCs and operating systems.
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Best Answer
Any FT232 chip is good(ie FT232R). The drivers are publicly available and windows will download automatically.
It will show up as a serial port and there are many pre-built solutions available. The Company that makes the FT232 chips, FTDI, will sell many solutions they developed in-house, also.