Hey, sorry everyone, I know it’s been a while. But I hope this post will make up for that! Anyone who has done embedded programming knows that an easy way for microcontrollers (like arduino) to connect to a PC is through a serial connection. Unfortunately, not many computers have a serial port these days, and while are a lot of chips that will act like a usb-serial converter, they tend to be somewhere in the $3-5 range.
However, I found one chip, the CH340G, that only costs 40 cents! You can buy it on places like Aliexpress. The only problem is getting a working schematic. The company only releases a datasheet for the CH340T and CH340R versions of the chip. By trawling through several sites, I managed to create a pinout, an eagle part, and example schematics for the CH340G. Here they are!
