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Use Db9 female connector in your board, since PC have DB9 male connector , or if your PC dont have DB9 then you may need to used RS232 to USB converter cable, which has male DB9 port.
The original plan when the D-sub connector family was introduced was that equipment would always have female connectors and cables would always have male connectors. The idea was that pins are easily damaged, and it's usually easier to replace a cable than to replace a connector on a piece of equipment. Designations such as "DCE" (data communications equipment) and "DTE" (data terminal equipment) would indicate whether signals such as TXD and RXD were inputs or outputs on the equipment.
However, when the IBM PC came along, they decided to use D-sub connectors for a number of different purposes, so in order to reduce confusion for users, they used a female connector for the printer port and a male connector for the COM (UART) port.
As a result, it has become common to use a male connector on DTE and a female connector on DCE. If you want to connect your device to a PC, you should put a female connector on it so that you can use a straight-through male-to-female cable to plug it in.
And just to be pedantic, the correct designation is "DE-9". "DB" refers to the larger shell used for the 25-pin connector.
Assumptions:
- Both devices are terminals, with signal termination.
- Both devices have an EIA RS232 standardized DB9F using the bare minimum of signals: Rx (pin 2), Tx (pin 3) and GND (pin 5).
Then a gender changer will not work, since it is a straight connection connecting pin 2 female to pin 2 male etc.
You need a null modem which looks the same but flips signals 2 and 3 (and a bunch of others, in case you also use hardware handshaking etc) but does not flip ground. Looks about the same but has different signal routing. Example. They are typically male-to-female, but maybe it is possible to find a male-to-male one somewhere.
The connector is not a DB9 but a DE9.
The Digilent adapter is a DCE side device with female connector, intended to be connected to a DTE such as a computer with a male connector.
Your other device is also equipped with a DE9 female connector, so assumption is that it is also a DCE side device and needs to be connected to a DTE.
You cannot connect two DCEs directly together with an adapter that does not swap pins.
You need an adapter cable to cross over the data pins.
You can easily buy null modem cables between two DTEs as it is very common to connect computers together.
However you need a cable that can connect two DCEs together.
Better make your own cable to get the pinout and handshaking correct as required by both devices.