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I don't remember all of that RS232 stuff because my memory is that good - I'm reminded every time I deal with anything "embedded" :). I still cross my fingers when flashing - hoping my chosen speeds and params won't brick the device.

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I helped design an USB-to-serial converter thing to directly go into the silicon of one of these chips you can program. It acts like an USB-to-serial converter on the USB side, but on the device side, it 'forgets' the to-serial and simply directly spits out the bytes it receives on USB. It's interesting how many serial-related parameters become no-ops - you can set the baud rate, parity, data bits etc to whatever value you want, the device happily ignores it and everything keeps working anyway. It's the nice part of tight standards, I guess.

(But don't ask me about the shenanigans Windows needs to see in the USB descriptor to allow programs to access an otherwise driver-less USB device - yech)

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