FTDI cable, huzzah, trinket pro problem

[darthjayhawk]

I recently purchased an FTDI cable (#70), Huzzah ESP8266, and a Trinket Pro (and other items). Initially, I was unable to program the Huzzah or the Trinket Pro via the FTDI cable. The Trinket Pro worked fine via USB. I also tested the cable using one of your web pages. After a lot of frustration, I decided to try swapping the RX and TX lines from the cable using jumper wires, and everything started working.

It appears that either the cable I recieved is wired incorrectly, or both the Huzzah and the Trinket Pro are wired incorrectly. I would suggest that the appropriate web pages be updated to warn others of this problem, and/or whichever of these products is incorrect be corrected.

Otherwise, great products!

[adafruit_support_bill]

It sounds like the cable you received was wired incorrectly. This is not a problem we have seen before. I'll have our QA team look into this.

Can you post a photo of the header end of the cable?

[darthjayhawk]

Here is the picture:

ftdi_cable.jpg (985.85 KiB) Viewed 366 times

[adafruit_support_bill]

That looks correct - at least as far as wire-colors go. Is this the original state, or after you swapped Rx/Tx?

[dhalbert]

It's also possible that there's a swap at the other end, due to a soldering mistake. I have a working FTDI cable, and took pictures of the connections at the USB end. The plastic cover is two pieces just press-fit together. I just inserted a thin knife blade and twisted slightly to take the halves apart. Nothing broke in the process, and i was able to reassemble it easily. The halves are not symmetrical: one has extra pegs in the middle to support the board. Here are pictures of the connections on my working cable. They're a little blurry, but you can see the colors.

ftdi-123.jpg (64.88 KiB) Viewed 332 times

ftdi-456.jpg (73.39 KiB) Viewed 332 times

(I am just a customer, not an Adafruit employee)

[darthjayhawk]

The first photo is in the original state, I used jumper wires to reverse the tx/rx.

It appears to be as you surmised, the yellow and orange wires are soldered incorrectly as you can see in this photo.

cable.jpg (322.43 KiB) Viewed 323 times

[darthjayhawk]

adafruit_support_bill:

I am finally getting back to this. As you can see in the last picture I posted, the cable is wired incorrectly at the usb/ftdi end. It doesn't match the picture of a working cable that the other user posted. I am getting a bit tired of using the jumper wires in order to use it. Should I attempt to fix it myself, or will adafruit send me a replacement cable?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[adafruit_support_bill]

This is fairly easy to fix. Just use a small screwdriver or other pointed object to release the pins from the connector shell and swap the wires.

Or if you prefer a replacement, please contact [email protected] with a link to this thread.