Hi Walter,

I do have experience with USB to UART, but only minimally with the FTDI chips. From that limited experience I can offer you two suggestions.

First, check your crystal. If memory serves the chip requires its own crystal, and is rather unforgiving on the matter. I believe that the crystal is probably responsible for 99% (a totally made up though representative statistic) of the problems people have getting the chip to work. Check the manufacturer's documentation for more on the subject.

Second, I also seem to recall that the documentation had some fairly helpful troubleshooting/diagnostic help. They also have quite a few application examples, complete with schematics. If you don't already have the documentation, go to the manufacturer's website to download and read it before you do anything else.

Finally, I will also tell you that I ended up going with the SiLabs CP2102. It will not be trivial to place and solder on your circuit board, but once you accomplish that it's much simpler to use. I also like the SiLabs API. It makes the Windows programming (communicating with the PC) dead simple.

Joe