CH341 testing

[Bricksnbeatles]

Hey folks. Finally getting around to building my FV-1 dev board, and I was wondering if there’s a way to test the CH341 before I populate the rest of the board. I don’t remember where I got the IC from, and I don’t 100% trust its legitimacy, so I don’t want to find out at the very end that it’s no good. Could I populate just this section, and then feed it 3.3v and see if my computer recognizes it? It seems like this should be the case, but I really have a very minimal understanding of the computer world, so I just want to make absolutely sure that it would be a safe and accurate way to test that the chip is real and functional

 

[jwin615]

Hack up a USB cable and put it on the bread board?

 

[derevaun]

It seems like it would work to power it up without anything connected to SCL & SDA. It's probably not dispositive that a computer would recognize it as a USB device, but pretty close. Arduino IDE would make it easy, provided the drivers are installed.