Quad Serial Adapter.
Despite concerted efforts to kill them, serial ports are alive and well, especially in embedded system. True, most of them end in a USB port, these days, but there's still a lot of gear with a DE-9 (it isn't a DB-9, despite the common use of the word) or a TTL-serial port lurking around. [James Fowkes] got tired of managing a bunch of USB to serial adapters, so he decided to build his own FT4232 breakout board that would provide four serial ports from a USB connection.
The small board has transmit and receive LEDs for each port along with EMI and ESD protection on the USB port. The ports are all TTL serial, serving the modern hacker, and the 3.3V pins are 5V tolerant.
This is one of those things that isn't very difficult to do, but is super handy. Having it all on a well thought out board ready to go, is a time saver.
If you long for the old parallel port, FTDI devices can do a bit bang mode. If you are really paranoid about protecting your USB port, you might consider using galvanic isolation.
Source: www.bing.com
Images credited to www.bing.com and d1tqc0m69rhker.cloudfront.net
