UPDATE: 12 March 2017
Android things developer preview 3 adds support for USB-serial devices, making this method redundant for single USB-Serial adapters. This may be still useful for the QUAD UART used in this post. Read more about it here.
There’s nothing quite like the good old fashioned UART for connecting things together. It’s a technology that persists because it’s simple and it works. The Raspberry Pi has one UART. With it you can connect to exactly one peripheral. That’s not enough. We need more UARTs.
One solution to the ‘not enough UART’ problem is to use a USB-Serial converter. There’s been a Linux kernel driver for the FTDI USB-serial converters for years now, these are a well supported, mature technology. The aim of this experiment is to see if I can get an FTDI USB-Serial converter working with the Raspberry Pi 3 running the Android Things preview image 1.
4 port FTDI UART