#Prolific usb to serial driver fix drivers#

And then I suddenly spotted a data cable for EPSolar Tracer that has Exar USB-SERIAL chip inside. My Linux device was powered from the same Midnite KID, having the same ground already! That means swapping RX and GND just made a short-circuit between data wire and real ground resulting in zero signal! Powering the same Linux PC from external power supply made it work like a charm.ДЄt this stage my last PL2303 got burned and I looked around for something else. It could be fixed by swapping RX and Ground wires, but.

It seems like those cheap PL2303 boards are designed for TTL 3.3v signal levels and while they can handle UART 5v voltage, data becomes inverted. However I was able to see the pattern in that message and it could be possibly decoded. After several liters of coffee I realized that on Mac and Windows I had to revert RX and GND for uknown reason, otherwise message text was garbled. I was shocked and overwhelmed - it works with Mac, works with Windows 8 and 10 PCs, but not on Linux, even with latest kernels and drivers. I spent a day backporting 4.19 driver to old kernel and recompiling, bricked and restored my Linux PC several times and finally got it working, but not with Midnite KID. Previous driver could possibly work with 'cheap UART TTL 2303' converter, but most of the time it refuses to. To handle HX series there was a patch in pl2303.c driver around kernel 4.2 adding a thing called TYPE_HX mode. There is completely other story with Linux drivers. It could be easily fixed using old drivers, as with the link above or here:

#Prolific usb to serial driver fix drivers#

To cut some tails they managed to change latest Windows drivers rendering them incompatible with fakes. Prolific itself never produced HX chips, only HXD. So, first of all, there are tons of fake PL2303 chips, most of them are called PL2303HX. Well, sorry for necroposting, but I want to share some interesting information on PL2303 and Midnite devices.