Hi everyone

What kind of console connector interface do you add to your devices to make the serial interface easy to access, and why?

I am speaking of a physical connector on your OpenWRT device, not the USB-to-serial adapter.

For example, most Cisco devices use an RJ45 plug for their serial console interfaces, while others use a standard DB9 interface.

Almost none of the cheap consumer type devices which we install OpenWRT make their serial/jtag interfaces accessible outside of the chassis, and sometimes don't even make it accessible on the board.

Considerations are likely size, cost, and ease of use.

My use case for having a console is my testing/dev devices, where it is possible that I might screw up networking or booting so bad that I need to recover from console or even TFTP/XMODEM over a fresh image.

In my case, I am mostly working with the TP-Link TL-WR710N, which you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/9QwkM

What I do for my devices is use a 4-pin DuPont female breadboard jumper cable, cut it in half, and solder it to the TTL pins on the board. Then I make a cutout for it somewhere on the device and glue the female connector so it is accessible from outside the casing.

Then, I use a TTL  serial adapter rather than a 5V RS232 adapter, or a little RS232-to-TTL level adapter in between. This is cheap, the cutout size is small, and looks pretty good once I glue it in place.

I use cables like this: http://www.amazon.com/2-54mm-Solderless … 00O9YBVGA/

Using a full-sized DB9 serial adapter would be difficult for most devices, due to it's size being large.

There are some micro-USB-to-TTL boards out there, like this one, but they are kinda costly and take up space in the chassis which you may not have:  http://www.amazon.com/Ft232rl-Serial-Ad … B00IJXZQ7C

Comments?

(Last edited by jmomo on 30 Apr 2015, 23:00)

See my post where I mentioned to use the serial port of an old Fon2100 WIFi router as my serial/console port to troubleshoot my other devices.

My question was not related to what USB-to-serial adapter you like to use, but what kind of physical connector interface to install upon the router for that connection.

I will edit and clarify my question above so that there is less possibility for confusion.

AliExpress (1 or 2) has this board for much less.

(Last edited by mazilo on 1 May 2015, 03:19)

Since many people fear soldering I want to ask:

Has anybody experience with solderless headers like: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10527 ?

It might be a solution for some boards that have open TTL pin holes (some boards have filled holes "ready" for soldering)

PS: I try to use normal pinheaders but some are difficult to install on some boards.

(Last edited by zloop on 1 May 2015, 05:59)