Re-spinning a board for chip shortage management… and bumping in a quad usb-to-uart chip!

We redesigned many of our CP2104 boards for the almost-but-not-quite-pin-compatible CP2012N … only to find that now that part is affected by the shortage / price increases that have been hammering everyone. We did find some great ‘drop-in’ compatible USB-to-serial adapters from @WCH_TECH called CH9102F, and we’re using them in a few ESP32 boards for now. So far they’re a fair replacement. Since we expect we won’t be able to stock or standard CP2102 or CP2104 ‘UART friend’ we just swapped out the silk to make a CH9102F so folks can verify functionality without hot airing parts like we did. While we were on the WCH site to grab drivers we noticed they had a QUAD UART chip! – it even can come with USB HS for piping lots of data. This could be kinda handy, we have gotten requests for dual/quad uart adapters before. A google image search pops up a few folks who have used this chip to make quad-RS232 driver boards, so it seems promising!

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