I fail to understand why something that would seem hugely common and helpful is so poorly documented and described in the circuit world.
All I want to do is connect the DATA OUT pin on a serial port from my PC to some kind of shift register, or UART, or converter in such a way that sending data bits in serial order will result in a single register of 8 parallel bits on an external circuit.
How can I do this? I don't want to use an Arduino or an entirely separate microcontroller, I just want to build a circuit that detects the baud rate of incoming serial data (start bits, stop bits, etc.), and outputs it as parallel data at fast pace.
Not sure why I'm having such a hard time researching this.
Attempt #1: Send data through the DATA OUT serial port pin to a shift register, and alternate 1 and 0 on one of the "READY" serial port pins for the clock speed on the shift register. This works, but something is limiting the alternating changes on the "READY" pin of the serial port to 1000 hz, so basically that's the limit.
Attempt #2: Buy a 24-pin digital I/O board from Measurement, then try to change the values of the pins quickly in C#. Unfortunately the board I got is not meant for high speed digital out, and the library calls take 7ms apiece which is really slow.
Attempt #3: Thinking about buying a UART chip and trying to wire it up to the serial port. Will this work? I can't tell if all UART chips have automatic baud rate detection or not. I feel like I need the chip to auto-detect the baud rate because there's no way for me to tell an external device what baud rate my PC is sending. Why is that? Seems dumb that serial ports can't send out a clock signal, just data.
I realize that I'm being too dumb to grasp this, so anything obvious that I'm missing would be greatly appreciated.
All I want to do is connect the DATA OUT pin on a serial port from my PC to some kind of shift register, or UART, or converter in such a way that sending data bits in serial order will result in a single register of 8 parallel bits on an external circuit.
How can I do this? I don't want to use an Arduino or an entirely separate microcontroller, I just want to build a circuit that detects the baud rate of incoming serial data (start bits, stop bits, etc.), and outputs it as parallel data at fast pace.
Not sure why I'm having such a hard time researching this.
Attempt #1: Send data through the DATA OUT serial port pin to a shift register, and alternate 1 and 0 on one of the "READY" serial port pins for the clock speed on the shift register. This works, but something is limiting the alternating changes on the "READY" pin of the serial port to 1000 hz, so basically that's the limit.
Attempt #2: Buy a 24-pin digital I/O board from Measurement, then try to change the values of the pins quickly in C#. Unfortunately the board I got is not meant for high speed digital out, and the library calls take 7ms apiece which is really slow.
Attempt #3: Thinking about buying a UART chip and trying to wire it up to the serial port. Will this work? I can't tell if all UART chips have automatic baud rate detection or not. I feel like I need the chip to auto-detect the baud rate because there's no way for me to tell an external device what baud rate my PC is sending. Why is that? Seems dumb that serial ports can't send out a clock signal, just data.
I realize that I'm being too dumb to grasp this, so anything obvious that I'm missing would be greatly appreciated.