For a long time, I’ve been puzzled at the proprietary drivers used by FTDI and Prolific chips, when modern OSs include USB CDC drivers already. Why not just build the hardware to implement the standard?
It appears that Arduino have been doing just that, with the firmware running on the Atmega8u2 chips included on the new Uno R3 boards, among other things. Recently they spun this off to a standalone board called the USB Serial Light. http://arduino.cc/en/Main/USBSerial
However, that sucks because it’s 5-volt-only. Everything I work with these days is 3-volt. So my request is for a respin of the Serial Light board, with 5v/3v switchability, and hopefully a pretty beefy 3v3 regulator on it – the FTDI-based boards just supply whatever the chip produces internally for its own use, and that’s just shy of enough.
In light of the recent FTDI chip-bricking kerfuffle, and Prolific’s drivers crashing with clones, it seems only sensible to eschew all the proprietary chips and use the pure CDC implementation running on a commodity micro. Working with generic drivers built into the OS would just be a bonus. 