This is a basic breakout board for the FTDI FT232RL USB to serial IC. The pinout of this board matches the FTDI cable to work with official Arduino and cloned Arduino boards. The major difference with this board is that it brings out the DTR pin as opposed to the RTS pin of the FTDI cable. The DTR pin allows an Arduino target to auto-reset when a new sketch is downloaded. This is a really nice feature to have and allows a sketch to be downloaded without having to hit the reset button. This board will auto reset any Arduino board that has the reset pin brought out to a 6-pin connector.
The pins labeled BLK and GRN correspond to the colored wires (black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green as the sequence of resistor color code from 0 to 5) on the FTDI cable.
You can see serial traffic on the TX and RX LEDs on the board to verify if the board is working.
This board was designed to decrease the cost of Arduino development and increase ease of use.
One of the nice features of this board is a jumper on the top of the board to be configured to either 3.3V or 5V. You can resolder the jumper if you need to switch between 3.3V and 5V.
