RE: [N8VEM-S100:5614] S100 Serial IO Design Question

["G. Beat" <gregor...@gmail.com>]

Here us some baseline references and design materials.

I am going to reference the Sparkfun and FTDI cables (USB to UART) part numbers and
data-sheets below.

FTDI TTL-232R-5V cable, here is the Data Sheet.
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/Cables/DS_TTL-232R_CABLES.pdf

SparkFun DEV-09718, +5 V USB cable (their Chinese import version of FTDI cable)
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9718

SparkFun schematic
https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/DevTools/FTDI%20Cable%205V.pdf

The 6 wires at the end of the cable are terminated in a 0.1" female SIL connector 
(Molex 50-57-9006) commonly found as a interface access on many breakout boards. 

The Spakfun cable wires in the SIL are Color Coded using the resistor color hierarchy.

1 - BLACK : GND
2 - BROWN : CTS
3 - RED : Vcc (In this case 5 VDC)
4 - ORANGE : TxD
5 - YELLOW : RxD
6 - GREEN : RTS
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Hope this helps get some designer started.

The other option for USB incorporation is to actually place the SSOP-28 (FT-232RL) USB-UART IC on the PC board,
THEN you can use the PC motherboard standard (4-pin or 5-pin SIL) for USB 2.0 expansion ports.  Those cables are readily available for the PC marketplace.