usb to serial adaptors

[johnsold]

I have used the Keyspan adapters. They will work on both Windows and Macintosh.

One oddity I discovered (after much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair): The handshaking lines may only be active when the device is being read or written. I had a serial device which steals power from the handshaking lines. Between writing a command to it and reading the response to it, the handshakning lines would go inactive. If the delay was long enough for the capacitor in the device power stealing circuit to discharge, the device would shutdown and forget what command had been sent. I used a property node to assert the handshaking lines in the initialization VI and leave them asserted until the program is finished with the devices. This behavior did not seem to be documented anywhere.

Lynn

[Michael_Munroe]

I highly recommend the Edgeport adapters from Digi.  They are available in 4 or 8 ports with a choice of 9 or 25 pin connectors.  A driver is required for WinXP.  LV had no problem with (2) x 4 using coms 7 thru 14.  $299 for 4 ports.

http://www.digi.com/products/usb/edgeport.jsp

[shoneill]

I agree with Michael here, Edgeport adapters are good.

Moxa, who usually have a good name have disappointed me recently.  But maybe they're only over here in Europe, I don't knoe.

Another good product I found (and inexpensive too) is here.

Page is in german, but the article number should allow a global search for similar parts.  These support all VISA functions. Some NI cards and Moxa carda don't support programmatically flushing the receive buffer.....  The abovementioned ones (Edgeport and Exsys) do.

Shane.