USB serial adapters known to work. Single and multi-port.

[poppo]

Just thought it might be good to list USB adapters that people have tried and work.

All tests were done using Windows XP and on two S+ machines. Note: both programs work using the built in serial port. Also, although I don't think it's a factor, all tests were done using the simplified MAX232 adapter (the one with the MAX232 chip in the DB9 housing).

1. Single port DYNEX DX-UBD89 works with both the SIM app and SASTest (ocassionally needs to be unlugged and plugged back in to work with SASTest)

2. 4 port Edgeport adapter works with the SIM app but won't do anything with SASTest
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=400198015558

Note: XP will install the drivers for the Edgeport on it's own.

<edit> You can download a configuration utility for the Edgeport and changing some advanced port configuration settings will make it work with SASTest. I need to narrow down just which settings are needed. But for now checking low latency, fast reads & fast writes seems to get it going.
http://www.digi.com/support/productdetl.jsp?pid=2628&osvid=57&tp=5&tp2=0

[stayouttadabunker]

My Cables-To-Go adapter works with the Sim on an S2000 and an S+.
I paid $12.99 in the junk stuff bin at Walmarts...
It doesn't yet work with the S+ using the Test App.
I'll update this if there are any changes... >>>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/lr_Uxy2WrXA&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/lr_Uxy2WrXA&rel=0</a>

[jdkmunch]

I don't think it's the adapter that makes the difference -  I got this adapter from eBay and it DID NOT WORK on an Acer 110.


http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180549411344&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_1959wt_1088

However in the IBM X41 it WORKS and I'm using it now.

[poppo]

I don't think it's the adapter that makes the difference -  I got this adapter from eBay and it DID NOT WORK on an Acer 110.

However in the IBM X41 it WORKS and I'm using it now.

Besides the USB1.0 and USB2.0 'standards', there do tend to be differences in the USB ports, especially on laptops. Many times if there are multiple ports on the laptop (or even PC) there may be a built in hub with some of the ports on one hub, some on another and maybe a dedicated port. One needs to look at device manager under USB controllers and expand it to look. If you click on any item that says hub and go to properties, then click the power tab you will see how many physical ports are on that particular hub,how much power is available and how much is being used by the devices that are already connected. One of the biggest problems is connecting devices that draw too much power, but this will usually pops up a box telling you, and it shuts the port down.

The other thing to remember is USB is a shared line. So depending on what else you may have connected (even if it's on a different physical port) may be sharing the same root port. So let's say you have a hi-rez web cam connected to one port on a laptop or PC and then pug in one of these adapters. The web-cam may be eating up most of the bandwidth and can cause timing issues for the adapter, even though they are on different physical ports.

The worse thing to do is to plug in a hub to a port that is already part of a hub as you would be futher spreading the available bandwith (and power available unless the external hub is powered). On my laptop, I have 3 USB ports. 2 are on a built in hub and one is it's own dedicated port. So I would choose the dedicated port to plug in a hub if I needed to. Actually it has a 3rd port, but that is dedicated to the 'docking station' that has two more ports on it.

And sometimes they just plain don't work right for some unknow reason. I had one Toshiba laptop that the USB port worked fine for everything except transferring movies to an iPod touch. They would transfer fine with my other laptop (also a Toshiba but a different model). Nothing else was plugged into any of the other ports, but it would always crap out part way through the transfer. i ended up buying a USB PCMCIA card to solve that problem. It worked fine with that. Maybe it was the USB chipset being used or maybe a driver issue.

So yes, it could indeed also be the USB port. Or it could be a combination of both the port and adapter. So while the devices listed here may work for one person they may not for another. But at least it might help to know which ones 'can' work.

[reho33]

There is also the point of shared current. I think 500MA total per port is the max you can draw. Self powered USB devices don't count as they are self powered. But when you exceed that, devices can drop out and mess with your configuration. I personally have hooked 4 devices to a PC with 4 USB-> Serial port converters and have had no problems. In the "old days" some computers had a Digi-Board that offered 8 serial ports but it was several thousand dollars.

[stayouttadabunker]

From what I'm understanding...could it be that something like this PCI card
I've pictured below may not work because they're all drawing from
a single source of power on the motherboard in the PC? >>>

[poppo]

From what I'm understanding...could it be that something like this PCI card
I've pictured below may not work because they're all drawing from
a single source of power on the motherboard in the PC? >>>

No. That it totally different and would be the best solution for a PC (vice a laptop). Those are direct RS232 ports and will have much less problems because you don't have to 'translate' though the USB bus first.

The really simplified version:
That card = Software -> RS232 port-> data in/out
USB RS232 = Software -> USB driver -> USB RS232 -> data in/out

[jay]

Are we going down the right road here... ?
While I am sure we will successfully cobble something together that will work for us at home.

I am sure the casinos don't use big PCs with multiple RS232s ......

It would be nice to have 1 interface to the PC and then a daisy chain scenerio from machine to machine.

I think the fiber sounded good with either an adapter on the PC or on one of the machines.

[poppo]

Are we going down the right road here... ?
While I am sure we will successfully cobble something together that will work for us at home.

I am sure the casinos don't use big PCs with multiple RS232s ......

It would be nice to have 1 interface to the PC and then a daisy chain scenerio from machine to machine.

I think the fiber sounded good with either an adapter on the PC or on one of the machines.

Either way people still need a working RS232 port on the machine, and that was the main intent of this thread (USB adapters that work).

However, personally I think the multi-port RS232 option would be better for most home users. Cheaper to implement, and IMO I think the software would be easier to develop. In the other thread AndyP talked about polling and not knowing which machine the received data is coming from if there are timing issues. By having dedicated RS232 ports to each machine, that issue is solved since data on port 1 is always coming from machine 1, etc..

In my case I only have two S+ machines without TITO, so the multi-port solution works perfect. I just run two instances of the sim program, one pointed to each machine and both can be controlled easily. They don't really need to talk to each other, but it would not be that difficult to use the logging feature and a script to look for cetain events and trigger others. For example, press the service button to trigger a 'credit to host' transaction on that machine and then add those credits to the other machine.  TITO without the ticket.

[AndyP]

Are we going down the right road here... ?
While I am sure we will successfully cobble something together that will work for us at home.

I am sure the casinos don't use big PCs with multiple RS232s ......

It would be nice to have 1 interface to the PC and then a daisy chain scenerio from machine to machine.

I think the fiber sounded good with either an adapter on the PC or on one of the machines.

Casino's do 2 things depending on the system. Some have smart devices in the machine, usually a part of the player tracking or loyalty system that poll each machine individually. IGT has SMIC, or smart interface card among others, Komami has a NAM (not sure what that stands for). The smart interface either hooks up using ethernet or rs485 to the host system.

The other way is using Fibre optic. This requires a smart device at each bank, or couple of banks that connect back to the host system via ethernet. This is the method that system I am currently working uses. It has an PC104 industrial pc on each bank with custom FO card. We just developed a new version that uses an industrial pc off the shelf and a PCI fibre optic card.

I have in the past also daisy chained up several weigh scale indicators using rs232 for an industrial control system, and the same can be done here with releative ease.

The PCI cards we use have 4 ports, so can run just over a 100 machines. However we also use them for player loyalty wedges, 2 ports for gaming machines, 2 for loyalty wedges. These cards from memory are about AU$700 (so about the same in USD). Probably out of the price range for most home users.

I still reckon the best way is to mutidrop via rs232. I will get the dll sorted eventually. Just dont have enough time to spend on it at the moment. If I cant get it to multidrop successfully, then maybe I can make a simple hardware device to do the polling using a really cheap PIC (or similar) microcontroller.

[Foster]

I think the best way would be for those that have maybe more than 2 -4 machines would be to build RS232 to RS485 adapters and install one for each machine and the PC
depending which way you want to do RS485 you can use 2 wires or 4 wires.

[stayouttadabunker]

I found fiber optic PCI network cards for like $10.
These are single ports but I've also seen some for less than $30 with double ports.
Below is just an example picture but I see that the 3Com PCI card
seems to be a popular one here in the States and fairly cheap to buy?>>>

http://cgi.ebay.com/3C905B-FX-SC-3COM-100-BASE-FX-PCI-FIBRE-OPTIC-NIC-CARD-/250540786995?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3a55650533

[AndyP]

I found fiber optic PCI network cards for like $10.
These are single ports but I've also seen some for less than $30 with double ports.
Below is just an example picture but I see that the 3Com PCI card
seems to be a popular one here in the States and fairly cheap to buy?>>>

http://cgi.ebay.com/3C905B-FX-SC-3COM-100-BASE-FX-PCI-FIBRE-OPTIC-NIC-CARD-/250540786995?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3a55650533

Wrong type of fibre. Needs to be versalink fibre

[stayouttadabunker]

Update:
I just got the Inside Out Edgeport/4 USB Convertor in the mail and Windows downloaded the drivers.
I've also downloaded the Edgeport/4 port Configuration Utility tool.
I have a very slowly blinking good-to-go green light on the serial hub and I'm presently constructing
another serial cable to see if I can connect two S+'s to my PC.

Stay tuned for details at 11...>>>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/F4BOzOpPYUo&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/F4BOzOpPYUo&rel=0</a>

[poppo]

Update:
I just got the Inside Out Edgeport/4 USB Convertor in the mail and Windows downloaded the drivers.
I've also downloaded the Edgeport/4 port Configuration Utility tool.
I have a very slowly blinking good-to-go green light on the serial hub and I'm presently constructing
another serial cable to see if I can connect two S+'s to my PC.

Stay tuned for details at 11...

You may have to set these flags with the config program for the test app. The sim program works fine either way. By default none are set.

Also, by default windows may have numbered them com 4 to com 8 or whatever. As long as you don't have any other serial ports you can make them 1-4 either with windows or the config program. The sim program only supports com 1-4. I have one physical port on my laptop, so I made mine 2-5.

[stayouttadabunker]

When I went into configuration utility, it indeed showed that
the PC reconfigured those serial ports as 5-8.
I also have a physical serial #1 port on my PC... so I changed the hub ports to 2-5 as well.




<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/N640ZccNmNw&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/N640ZccNmNw&rel=0</a>

[stayouttadabunker]

Okay,
I plugged in the serial cable to the Edgeport/4 into
the 1st serial port on the back of it - which is really now COM2.
The S+ has full communications with my PC using the Sim. 

However, there are NO communications using Andy's TestApp. 

Would anyone have an Edgeport/4 manual I can look at?
When I plugged in the serial cable - the edgeport's only LED on the front panel
went from a slowly blinking green to a wicked fast RED blinking.
It didn't hurt communication with the SIM running.
In fact, I turned the SIM program back on...
even though while the Edgeport panel was still flashing the fast RED LED -
communications were still excellent...

I think what's going on is the Edgeport has lost COM1 - which is what Andy's TestApp needs?
Is there a way to modify the App so it can "read" COM2 ?
Or should I just change the port assignments in the PC
to make the Edgeport/4 as ports/COMs 1 through 4 -
which of course changes the PC's physical serial port COM 1 to COM 5 ??

[Foster]

You can set two options in TestApp first one is the Com port number and the second one is the SAS address.

[poppo]

Okay,
I plugged in the serial cable to the Edgeport/4 into
the 1st serial port on the back of it - which is really now COM2.
The S+ has full communications with my PC using the Sim.  

However, there are NO communications using Andy's TestApp.  

Would anyone have an Edgeport/4 manual I can look at?
When I plugged in the serial cable - the edgeport's only LED on the front panel
went from a slowly blinking green to a wicked fast RED blinking.
It didn't hurt communication with the SIM running.
In fact, I turned the SIM program back on...
even though while the Edgeport panel was still flashing the fast RED LED -
communications were still excellent...

I think what's going on is the Edgeport has lost COM1 - which is what Andy's TestApp needs?
Is there a way to modify the App so it can "read" COM2 ?
Or should I just change the port assignments in the PC
to make the Edgeport/4 as ports/COMs 1 through 4 -
which of course changes the PC's physical serial port COM 1 to COM 5 ??

Did you change the app to comm 2 ?
Also attached is the manual.

[poppo]

Or should I just change the port assignments in the PC
to make the Edgeport/4 as ports/COMs 1 through 4 -
which of course changes the PC's physical serial port COM 1 to COM 5 ??

FYI, should you decide to do this some time, first change the physical port to com 6, then change the edgport to 1-4, then you can change the physical one to 5. Windows does not like assigning two ports the same number at the same time. Even after you 'fix' one afterward, sometimes it honks up the driver and you have to start all over. The bottom line is avoid having two ports numbered the same at the same time.

Also, the test app was still a bit twitchy even with those flags set. So it may not work for you with the test app even though I got it working. It would not work at all before setting those flags.

[stayouttadabunker]

Update:
I set the physical PC serial port #1 to port #6.
I re-configured the Edgeport/4 to use COMs 1 through 4.
I have full communications with the S+ & PC this way using the SIM.


Still "no go" with the Test App with App set to "Comm Port 1" or any others after hitting "Initialize" button.
Are you guys getting the fast red LED when plugged into the Edgeport/4 ?

[poppo]

Still "no go" with the Test App with App set to "Comm Port 1" or any others after hitting "Initialize" button.

Maybe the next update will fix the timing thing. I just tried it again, and it worked ok. I like the way the slot remembers the last few events.

[poppo]

Are you guys getting the fast red LED when plugged into the Edgeport/4 ?

Yes, it will flash fast when the slot is powered up. This tells me the machine is outputting data whether the program is running or not. Just like the LED on the SAS RS232 board flashes.

I did notice it flashes much more erratically when the test app is running.

[stayouttadabunker]

Are you guys getting the fast red LED when plugged into the Edgeport/4 ?

Yes, it will flash fast when the slot is powered up.
This tells me the machine is outputting data whether the program is running or not.
Just like the LED on the SAS RS232 board flashes.

   I agree totally poppo,
When I pull the serial plug out of the back of the Edgeport -
 the LED goes back to a slowly blinking green.

When I plug the serial plug back in -
I have fully restored communications with the S+ using the Sim program.

The TestApp is another story however...

[poppo]

Have you tried running two instances of the sim (from different directories and set to different com ports) at the same time yet? It works fine for me and why I believe the separate com port to each machine is the best approach to 'networking' them in a home environment. I still plan to play with the sim log files and some 'macros' to get one machine to trigger an event on the other one of these days. Just not much to really do with a S+ other than maybe have the service button trigger a cash to host and then a EFT to the other machine. But I have not figured out how to send a single command with the sim program to add credits (with EFT). It always pops up a dialog box asking how much to add. And there seems to be some sort of checksum or CRC involved as even if I duplicate the exact command it sends and send it manually, it does not work.