Soldering some wires onto an FTDI chip in a pinch is great, but the chip is doing all of the work really. I was hoping to learn I could make a serial to USB with _less than_ an FTDI chip.
That said, respect for the effort of taking the photos and writing it up, and it was worth a read to learn about those naughty Scots bricking peoples devices with bad drivers.
It's the field - very wide range of ability. Some are stoked about making LEDs blink and others are busy dumping and reverse engineering ROMs. Just depends on one's own journey stage. In my case article is above my level...haven't dealt with UART before
For example, you'd be suprised how many practicing EEs I've met who aren't aware drag soldering is a thing. (Which is a fantastic technique btw, saves so much time and gets you much nicer joints than individually soldering )
I would've picked a more lazy approach, just pull the atmega chip from an arduino (to not cause issues), and use the rx and tx pins on the (now empty) arduino board, since they're both connected to ftdi chip already, and no de/soldering is needed.
[0] https://github.com/obdev/v-usb
I'll be interested in some FPGA content; I built my dissertation project on FPGA and would love to see some modern, affordable FPGA boards/circuits with useful I/O to actually build something like this. I'm sure they exist, I've just never looked.
Thanks for the interesting read and I'll keep an eye on your repo!