Ax0n’s Den

The company I work for has been converting their bank of serial fax modems over to USB modems.

Last year we replaced a bunch with MT5634ZBA-USB modems. These are awesome, you just plug em in and load the ACM kernel module and boom… /dev/ttyACM0 which acts just like a serial tty device.

This year we decided to do the rest. Much to my dismay, the MT5634ZBA-USB has been discontinued in favor of the brand spanking new MT9234ZBA-USB. So I order them, expecting maybe they have new compression capabilities or better color fax handling or maybe they print money or something… no, not even close. These devices are NOT ACM modems. They contain a serial to USB converter. You already know where this is going if you have ever used a laptop without a serial port and one of those USB to serial cables…

These devices contain a T13410 converter, that takes special firmware to load correctly. The latest version of the ti_usb_3410_5052 kernel module contains it’s own firmware, which does not work with the modem device. Additionally, it doesn’t have the VendorIDs/ProductIDs for the device. It looks like there are patch floating around for 2.6.26 which use the firmware loader instead, but 2.6.26 wont boot on this machine for some reason.

More to come as I have time.