Any experiences with USB to serial or parallel converters on macXP ?

Hi,

I was considering buying a PC for some electronics and CNC projects as I need both serial and parallel port outputs to talk to servo drives and embedded chip programming dingbot/thingy things that no software has been made for mac (nor do I think it ever will be now with the new intel chips)

a search on google yields many many examples of USB to serial and USB to parallel (printer) port converters ...

has anyone used either of these on a mac running XP ?

Is it as simple as that ?


cheers for any replies,

nick

I havn't used it with my Mac yet, but I've used a USB to Serial converter before on my old PC laptop and it worked fine. As long as you have the Windows drivers when you get it you should be fine. I used my cable to connect to a console cable so I could set up Cisco routers and switches.

Yeah. If you're using the new Mactels, you aren't even emulating windows.

So your question shouldn't be "has anyone used either of these on a mac running XP ?" But instead, "Does this product run on XP?"

And if it does, then there's your answer. Mactels aren't emulating Windows XP. They're actually running it, as an operating system. 100% native.

Logan said:

Yeah. If you're using the new Mactels, you aren't even emulating windows.

So your question shouldn't be "has anyone used either of these on a mac running XP ?" But instead, "Does this product run on XP?"

And if it does, then there's your answer. Mactels aren't emulating Windows XP. They're actually running it, as an operating system. 100% native.

Click to expand...

cool, thought so - just wanted to make sure before I forked out a few grand for my new puter :headphone:

cheers!

Well if it doesn't work... let me know.

I can't guarentee that every product will work flawlessly, but I'm rather surprised how well it's working for me thus far. My USB to PSX converter I had wouldn't work on OS X without fishing around the net for drivers.

On PC it ran auto-detected (This is what I expected, but since yours is a potential driver related issue maybe it'll give you hope)

Logan said:

Well if it doesn't work... let me know.

I can't guarantee that every product will work flawlessly, but I'm rather surprised how well it's working for me thus far. My USB to PSX converter I had wouldn't work on OS X without fishing around the net for drivers.

On PC it ran auto-detected (This is what I expected, but since yours is a potential driver related issue maybe it'll give you hope)

Click to expand...

Hi Logan,

USB/serial doesn't seem to be attracting too many warnings so I'm going to bite that bullet..

As for the parallel/UBS I've been in touch with some people and they are telling me that the system I plan to use wont even recognize USB/parallel converters on a 'real' PC (a redundant comparison now anyway) - the progs apparently find the parallel port directly and dont go through windows printer code-wotsit-blah-thingy thing -

I'm planning on using Maya to output positional data with respect to time in a .txt file or similar - I will develop a prog that will convert this info into pulses that will output via something like this puppy:

http://www.usbmicro.com/products.html

this is instead of the USB/parallel interface...

...Another thing to play around with is EMC in linux using the same piece of gear - this will save me from having to develop my own G-code step/dir pulse generator (excuse the techy CNC lingo) woohoo!

http://www.linuxcnc.org/

I'm pretty excited about getting to work ! :robot:

anyways cheers for your response - I'm thinking about this now as I am idle for a few days until I'm back at work saving for a trip and the new puter... In all honesty by the time I'm ready to buy all this carry-on a new range of mac's will be out