Dear Forum Members,
The new Laptops which were coming on the market with out Traditional Serial Port, and which was very essential for Instrumenation/Control Engineers.

Could Forum Members Explore on this Issue how you are overcomr this problems by connecting to the PLCs, DCS, Mouse and Instruments which were having the Serial Ports.

Regards,
Ravindra.

 

Use a USB to RS232 converter. These can be bought at most computer and office supply stores, both brick-and-mortar and online.

 

Just use a usb/com convertor. very low price and it works perfect.

 

I have tried 4 different USB / Serial converters. Different models would communicate nicely with some controllers but would not work with others. After wasting time will these different converters, I purchased a PCMCIA serial card and have not had any problems since. Try http://www.quatech.com/public/gotopcmciaser.htm

 

In India the Aten make USB - RS232 converter is available with Cubix, Pune; 020 4251594/5/6.

 

For Allen-Bradley. See ab.com knowledgeBase
for thoroughly tested models.

I bot the Belkin F5U103. Many
off-the-shelf versions MAY not work.

Someone else here chimed in with good advice that
COM1 is the ONLY port to use with the PIC
module. The USB dongles usually default to
COM4 - or only work on COM4.

 

We were facing the same problem with our new Laptops and as stated by SMN above we are using Quantech SSP-100 and DSP-100 PCMCIA serial adaptor. They are great but not for all the PLC's. They are Good for GE Fanuc 90-30, 90-70 series PLC, Windows Hypertermianl works fine and with other serial devices.
We could not make it work with AB PIC module for DH-485 but it works well with serial port on AB SLC / PLC / Control Logix processors using DF1 protocol.
Further more it requires little bit tweaking everytime you install this device as under windows 2000 it configure itself as COM4. Anyway this is better than USB / Serial port converter.

 

Dear Forum Memebrs,

Thanks for your valuable replies & Foreseen troubles. It's great Information
regards,

Ravindra.

 

hello, i purchased a toshiba laptop, the laptop had no rs232 port,but three usb,i could not link up with any mitsubishi plc, i purchased a convertor with a drive disk, did not respond,communication error. I took the laptop back and fortunatly the good salesman replaced it, with rs232/usb,compaq presario, goodluck.

 

Most USB/RS232 converters do not work well with industrial interfaces etc. Possibly because they don't handle all the RS232 signals the way they should. For the future stay away from RS232/485 based protocols and make sure to buy all new PLC and controllers etc. with Ethernet communication.

Jonas Berge
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