Hello,
I've got a device (a vinyl cutting/plotter) that has a 9 pin serial port and according to the blurb it a standard serial RS-232 and it provides the following pin-outs. I've checked a few websites and this doesn't seem to match, e.g. pin 1 is ground but they have it as RTS? Anyone shed any light on this as I'd rather just buy one but have no idea if what I'm buying will be right. I'm wondering if they've put '1' when they meant '7' as this is a chinese to english translated document?

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Pin 1 and pin 7 are both grounds. Explains it. If it's a 9-pin connection, use this.

That diagram only has one end (and 7 is only ground in 25 pin, I've got 9 at both ends). I know what the pins are, I just cannot figure out what they are doing in the diagram I showed (which is from the manual) as this isn't a cross-over but neither is it straight through.

It is clearly a db9 layout. I would match the signal name to those on the db9 pinout i gave you. I wouldn't go by their diagram directly. They have the TX data and RX data backwards as well. I would imagine that you are correct in assuming pins 7 and 1 are miss labeled. You don't have a cable for it laying around that you could "modify" or dissect?

I use a lot of RS232 in my j0rb, and usually pins 2-3 are crossed, with 5 straight through as ground; null-modem stylee, don't know if that helps though.

you never really know with some serial devices, they may have intentionally swapped some pins. My ups is like that, nut cant understand the ups at all without modifying a cable, and even then it still cant communicat reliably.

Well, I found a M-F 9 9-pin cable in a drawer at work, which had probably been there for 10 years, never checked the pin-outs and after plugging it in the device worked perfectly on COM1

So essentially I suspect the USB-Serial device driver just sucked.