Sorry to advertise a competing product, but I swear I’m not affiliated with FT or anyla.com. I ordered one of these [USB to RS232 adapters from anyla.com for $7.80 ($13.69 after including shipping). This is a little more money than the bare CP2102 chip, but definitely cheaper than the CP2102 breakout board.
What I actually got is a long cable with a USB connector on one end and RS232 on the other, which doesn’t match the pictured device, but looks like the same brand. I’m not sure if they just screwed up and substituted a nicer product for my order or if they just didn’t bother putting the correct picture on their order page (it does say “cable” on the page). Anyway, inside my USB to RS232 cable, I found that the FT232BM chip is being used.
I know SparkFun claims that the CP2102 chip is better than the FT232, but I don’t understand why. The FT232 seems to have better Linux support, although I haven’t used it much in Linux myself.
Surfing around on FT’s web site, I found that they have a direct access driver SDK called D2XX that allows you to put the chip into bit-bang I/O mode (there’s also a similar third party SDK for Linux). This seems like a very nice feature for people like us.
I want a patch to the WinPic source code so that it can use the bit-bang I/O mode of this chip to drive my [HOODMICRO PIC Programmer. Using this combination, it would be possible for people to build their own USB PIC Programmer from scratch. All existing USB PIC Programmer designs that I know of require you to have a microcontroller preprogrammed to make the circuit work (no way for a new user to bootstrap themselves). I made a proof of concept for this USB programming mode work once, but my code is too messy and buggy to submit as a patch so far (totally broke normal serial port support in the process).
This bit-bang I/O mode alone seems a good reason to choose the FT232BM over the CP2102. If the CP2102 has a big-bang I/O mode, I couldn’t find anything mentioning it on Silicon Labs’ website.](http://www.k9spud.com/hoodmicro/)](http://www.anyla.com/usb-2-to-rs232-adapter-cable.html)