DrawBridge aka Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer

FTDI vs CH340

After a lot of research, quite simply, for this project, do not use anything with the CH340 chip on it. Use only genuine FTDI based converters. Also, the USB/Serial performed by the ATMegaA8U2 on the arduino UNO is also no good!

Why?

It started with random messages from people saying their board wasn't working properly. After a lot of investigation this chip is the cause.

To prove this, I wrote a very small piece of Arduino code that set the baud rate to 2Mbaud, and transmitted about 10k of data. On the PC, I received this data and checked it.

With the FTDI adapter everything was perfect. With the CH340 after the first 50 or so bytes, the results were sketchy, missing bytes, incorrect data. Basically a complete mess.

Whilst the CH340x chips may be cheaper, at these baud rates (and more specifically the throughput of data sent) you get what you pay for.

I now include a check for data errors as part of the diagnostics checker

...So... Say No, to the CH340! (at least for this project)