Anyone familiar with a type of data port/standard referred to as "Wide Bus" or "Wide data"? I've got an unlabeled USB to RS-232 type of device that has a port on it listed as that. Windows lists the USB device as a "FT230X Basic UART" when it's plugged in. The wide bus header has 4 pins, but only two actually appear to be used. No quiescent voltages are on any of the 4 pins. All I know about it is that it is used for transferring data, and I'd like to learn more about the standard.

 

The FT230 is a basic UART (serial transmit/receive) so its likely the port is either Tx & GND or Rx & GND or might be a vendor-specific differential 1/2 duplex bus. I suspect the 'wide bus' is some proprietry data transfer protocol over that serial link. Certainly AFAIK there is no standard 'official' protocol by that name/standard.

 

FT230 is

Here is the schematic for a development board for the FT230. develoment board See the CBUS comments. The FTxxx parts I used all had several different modes where they could do UART, SPI, Parallel etc.

If pins 15 & 12 are used them UART. If pins 5,11,12,14 are used then you will need to look for more information.

 

Thanks, guys. I'm going to try to do some experimentation and see what I come up with. I know effectively nothing about this type of thing. Most of my experience is with vacuum tube circuits. Not particularly useful here, unfortunately. I know that this setup is capable of tx AND rx over the two leads, and that's what really got me confused. Every standard that I've looked at would require 3 leads at the very least, and searches for "Wide Bus" etc have come up empty. I'm going to see if I can pop the lid and have a closer look at what's going on under the hood. Compare it to that schematic and whatnot. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.