Adafruit 954 USB serial cable

The Adafruit 954 USB serial cable can be used to:

• Power the Raspberry Pi
• Have console access via a serial port (built-in Prolific USB emulator and e.g. PuTTY on Windows laptop)

When using the Adafruit 954 USB cable on Windows 7 the Prolific driver seems already be installed, so you could skip this step. Simply connect the USB cable. You will see a device Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port; verify via Control Panel → System → Device Manager to get the port number.

The cable can be ordered via internet.

Known problems

Hardware problems

Transparent case for the Raspberry Pi model B+ is too low

There are some problems with the transparent case of Raspberry Pi B+:

• The case is too low for the Adafruit 954 USB serial cable; it bends the circuit pins
• The latch does not close properly
• There is no spare hole for the cable

Software problems

Driver problems; this leads system crashes (Blue screens) and potential data loss.

Bug Check: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

This indicates that a kernel-mode driver attempted to access pageable memory at a process IRQL that was too high. Possibly the Prolific driver contains a bug.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff560244%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Bug Check: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE

ACPI problem

See also

• RPi Serial Connection
• Raspberry Pi