JBtek Debug Cable and Raspberry Pi USB Programming USB to TTL Serial Cable

Works great from MacOS 10.11 El Capitan if one installs the v1.6.1 drivers from the Prolific site. I was able to set up a Raspberry Pi headlessly using the cable and a mid-2010 MacBook Pro. Make sure you set enable_uart=1 in the config.txt after writing the Raspbian image to sdcard for a Raspberry Pi 3, before booting for the first time.However, minus a star for Windows. The product description says it doesn't work with W8, so presumably it wouldn't with W10, but the Prolific website says the newest driver, v1.12.0 does work with W10. I couldn't get it to. It recognized the device in Device Manager when plugged in, but after installing the driver and rebooting, it still would not find it with the checkchip utility or let me use it via PuTTY, from multiple USB ports. I've never had any other trouble with USBs from W10 so my guess is there's still an incompatibility issue.Update: finally got it to work from W10. It took this YouTube video [...] which had a link to an older driver that is no longer distributed by Prolific, but is necessary because when it finally did work, ta-da, their ChipCheck util finally works and says says it is a PL-2303 XA / HXA chip, five or six years old, and the newer driver, which has gone to v1.14.0 as of this update, does not work with Windows >=8 with the XA / HXA. So if you cannot procure the drive ahead of time from the link I just provided, and you don't have a Mac, instead buy something that has a newer chip; make sure it has a PL-2303HX (Rev. D) or PL-2303HXD, not this cable.

I bought this to connect to the serial port of my Raspberry Pi 2 B. It did work, but there are a few problems with the unit I received:1) The chip won't work with Windows 8/8.1 at all. This isn't a dealbreaker for me, but it is something to know. (I have seen claims that it uses a counterfeit Prolific PL2303 chip, although I'm not certain this is the cause. Some older Prolific chips are simply unsupported by Windows 8, even if they are genuine.)2) The RX and TX wires were reversed. The product page describes a white RX wire and a green TX wire, and this is what other products have. To hook up a TTL cable, you need to plug the cable's RX into the TX wire on the board, and the cable's TX into the RX on the board. However, I had to plug the white wire into the *board's* RX port, and the green wire into the board's TX port; this means the white wire is TX and the green is RX. If that is too hard to parse, just understand that you may need to swap the RX/TX wires.3) It would have been nice if there were some kind of data sheet that shipped with the cable. I didn't realize at first that the wires were described on the product page itself, so I was afraid I'd have to fly blind.

So, i got this to work with an esp8266, specifically the adifruit huzzah. I was wanting an easy USB to TTL cable so I could program the device. I plugged in the cable, and windows 7 recognized it, but it would not work, in control panel it had the yellow error triangle. Investigating further gave me a cryptic message of "Device Could Not Start - Error Code 10". I had to spend about 30 minutes digging around online to find out how to make it work.To save you the time, this is what worked for me: [...]I downloaded the file off of a google drive they had listed, unzipped it and followed the directions on replacing the driver.I hope this saves someone time. So -1 star for it not working right out of the box, but other than that, it is working great.

I do not think the driver mentioned in the description is the compatible driver. I could not get this product Working on Windows 8/10. When I tried an OLD driver it was able to finally recognize the chipset but Prolific's chip version checking application says it's not PL2303HX.D but "PL2303 XA / HXA"

Pinout:Red - 5vBlack - GroundGreen - TxWhite - RxIf this device had a 3.3v power output it would get 5 stars. The 5v output is useful, but annoyingly I need to use a separate power supply to power an ESP8266 connected to this device.

Works well for connecting to serial console of various embedded systems.. but on Windows 10, you need to install an older version of the driver to work. To find it, search for "prolific driver version 3.3.2.105" (thanks previous reviewers).This cable is a lot more convenient than the cheaper exposed chip versions as they were a pain to attach/detect with the short cables. However, you may still want a USB extension cable or USB hub that extends to your work area.

As others have mentioned, this appears to use a non-Prolific (i.e Prolific clone) USB serial chip. It will work with Linux but may give you problems with Windows if you use the standard Prolific drivers.I also find it does not work well with a Raspberry Pi 3. I suspect that this is caused by marginal signal levels, but the problem may be on the Pi. I have seen this sort of cable work fine with other boards,

Broke in half when I lent it to someone. It wan't that sturdy to begin with. It does what it's supposed to.