Can this be used for arduino?

[bigone5500]

I salvaged an old blood pressure machine which had a USB interface. Upon further investigation, I realized that the interface had an FTDI MM232R board. I think it can be configured to work with arduino but am not 100% sure. Here is the datasheet link:

http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/Modules/DS_MM232R.pdf

 

[Harald Kapp]

The chip is a UART over USB tunneling chip. This means that the device has an internal serial (UART) port which is tunneled via USB to a PC where the driver emulates a so called virtual COM port. Therefore it is not a true USB device. You should be able to remove the FTDI module and tap directly into the UART port of the device from your Arduino.

 

[bigone5500]

Ok. I was hoping I could just connect some jumpers to it and plug it in. There are drivers available on their website.

 

[Harald Kapp]

These drivers will work on the PC, but not on the arduino.

When you unplug this module from the motherboard of the blood pressure machine, you have direct access to TxD and RxD (Pins 5&6, datasheet page 9) on the motherboard (you will not need the converter module for this!). These signals have a signal level that is defined by VCCIO (pin 3). Measure this voltage to find out whether TxD and RxD are directly compatible with the arduino (the arduino has 3.3V serial interface pins). In case VCCIO from the blood pressure machine is 5V, a simple series resistor (>1kΩ) may suffice to adapt the levels to the 3.3V arduino interface. Or you can employ any simple 3.3V to 5V level shifter circuit as will turn up from a simple Google search, e.g. this one.

 

[bigone5500]

Thanks for the reply. I will power it up and see what happens with the voltages.

 

[bigone5500]

Finally got around to testing this thing. It does have 5v output. I will need to build a circuit to use it...or I can just use the board I bought to do this...