Anybody seeing High Speed FTDI USB to Serial TTL causing computer crashes

[oldmanXJ]

My company designed a high speed USB to TTL adapter onto a product.  I am experiencing random but fairly frequent computer crashes with Win10 and LV15f2.  I have downloaded and installed the latest FTDI driver.  It does not really seem to be related to speed, as I am running 115200 baud.  I can sometimes even get a crash when I fire up NI-MAX and have it do an interface scan.

Has anybody else been experiencing this.  As long as I don't plug in this particular speed FTDI interface, I never see an issue and the software works at 115200 with other hardware with no failures as it has been doing for 6 months.  I am connecting two of these FTDI interfaces at the same time.

As long as I don't load LabVIEW or NI-MAX, but rather set it up under device manager and talk to them via TeraTerm, all is fine even at 3 megabaud.

[Bob_Schor]

I have a colleague who has been using one of these gadgets at 900KBaud without problems.  Maybe a bad device or a bad FTDI driver?  I have no direct experience with this device -- I just helped him write some of his first LabVIEW code to get data from it.

Bob Schor

[LV_Pro]

Probably unrelated, but what are you running this on? A few years ago I was having issues with the motherboard USB on an HP machine, had to put a USB board in.

[UliB]

Hello,

I saw some computer crashes (blue screens in Windows7) related to a USB to Serial Converter using a FTDI chip. Baud rate was 19k or 38k, not really high speed.

I replaced the converter with a 2 port serial PCIe card. Since then there were no more blue screens.

UliB

[LV_Pro]

That also reminds me of another issue I had with FTDI chip based device, where after some random period of the program running I would have a blue screen. In this case the supplier of the hardware using the FTDI chip had written a custom dll to wrap the standard FTDI calls. The problem was that it wasn't thread safe and apparently at random times would do something that annoyed Windows. I got them to reveal their calls to the original FTDI dll, which was thread safe, wrote a LabVIEW call library set to perform the functions their dll was supposed to do and no more crashes.

[rolfk]

Are you sure this is a genuine FTDI interface? There are chinese counterfeit products on the market, even with almost authentic logos on the chips, and they can certainly behave badly and FTDI obviously has absolutely no interest to make them work properly. At some point they even modified the driver to brick such chips on purpose but they quickly retreated from that, since most people had no understanding for such an action, considering that many users were not even aware they had been sold counterfeited products. It's definitely something to investigate into!