yay for lo-tech.
I have several customers who have old equipment. Robots and machine tools built before a certain time have RS232 ports and that is their ONLY method of communication to the outside world. I had programmed this robot some time ago, and we had never backed it up. SO I tunneled around until I found an old Pentium computer that had Dos 6.0 on it, and a serial port. And I had to ressurect a bunch of brain cells that I haven’t used in a very long time, but I managed to accomplish a backup of the old girl.
This is why I can never completely switch to Mac, this is one of at least a dozen types of machinery that can ONLY communicate with PC’s. And there are literally hundreds of thousands of these robots/machines out there. And now, it’s limited to only PC’s that have serial ports, and slow clock speeds. So I have to keep a couple around just to that purpose. I ought to set them up and get them connected so I can move the files around. Pity nobody makes an RS232 to USB adapter.
19 comments Og | Uncategorized
“Pity nobody makes an RS232 to USB adapter.”
Sorry Og, maybe I’m a bit obtuse- are you being sarcastic?
Tons of my old but still very useful hardware is still RS-232 (and RS-455 and RS-485) interfaced…
$20 gets you an USB-Serial adapter…
Or am I missing something?
TBG
You’re going in the wrong direction. I have a box full of USB to rs 232. You can’t get RS232 to USB.
Og
Try Calmotion device. Made in California. I have a lot of customers using it as a handheld and a permanent mount.
Good luck!
OK, maybe I’m being obtuse, but isn’t that commutative?
M
There are rs232 Bluetooth dongles available to attach to DB9 on equipment. I think Sewell has some. I have had good reliability with Sewell USB to Serial devices communicating with old rs232 equipment.
Mark: No. Not the way I’m looking for it, anyway. The Calmotion device comes close to the function I want, but not in a size I like. The Sewell stuff is just a high tech cable.
Worse than that, a while back (last fall) one of my co-workers was upgrading some control stuff and lost a computer. The only copy of the ‘legacy’ software was on a 5.25″ floppy. NOBODY around here had a 5.25″ drive still working. Had to send the floppy off. Got a CD with a little TINY drop of data on it.
MC
Oh, and BTW, my MacBook Pro (R) dual-boots to Windoze, too. However, I have NOT tried it on any of my equipment. That would be like using your Mercedes to haul hog feed.
MC
MC I keep several external drives around to that purpose; a 5.25, a 3″, an 8″, and a zip drive
You never know, do you?
I’m sure you know about RS232 to Ethernet terminal servers and they don’t solve your problem so now I’m wondering what’s being spoken across that connection…
ACZ, the problem is that the RS232 on a machine tool (Or robot) doesn’t act the way other RS232 acts. There are specific protocol, and until data is pushed or pulled over the RS232 (And it can only be pushed or pulled via the robot or machine, the external device simply emulates)it is as dead as a doorknob. Newer equipment has other, better com protocols, but on machine tools- especially of early 80’s to mid 90’s vintage, that is what you’re stuck with.
And MC: Exactly. No way I would want a decent piece of machinery to make contact with anything that involved Mac software.
Og
Yes it is a little large and pricey-$700 i believe. Our techs all carry one for service and data/parameter backup. Heck, some even get sold when the customers see how it works.
yeah, we used to sell a lot of Graco boxes the same way. Most of the time, though, we sell central systems that do this and integrate them to all the machines
I still keep an ancient laptop with dos+windows for workgroups on it. Some of the machines at work are old enough, the control software is dos based or you have to use windows programs that were written for win3.1 to back up programs and machine data and settings.
I still have a working 386 machine with 5.25 an 3.5 discs just for that odd ¨old school¨ hardware that we still use from time. Runs DOS 6.2. Dinosoars still have their use occasionally, both the hardware and the human. ;-)
Mostly Cajun: 5.25″ floppy? Ouch. A company I once worked for had saved it’s engineering files (from 1984 into the mid-90’s) on 5.25″ floppies. I transferred everything to CD as soon as CD-writers came down into the $200 range, and I learned that floppies start losing data at around 10 years old. That’s bad when you’re supporting deployed systems for 25 years!
I don’t know if the magnetic field fades with time or the ferrite film is actually breaking down. For data storage, it doesn’t matter, although it’s important if you’re supporting something so old you have to load it from floppies – one way, if you have a backup, you can re-write the floppy, but the other way you have to hope someone still makes new ones. I was just happy that there was a duplicate of each floppy, so between the two copies I could get almost everything – but I think a couple of years later we’d have been figuring what we could write off and what had to go to a data recovery service.
And I also learned that for as long as that data still mattered, I’d better also periodically check the CD’s. Good write-once CD’s are supposed to last at least 10 years, possibly 100 – so I make a fresh copy every 5 years for anything important. Also check whether the file formats will still be supported. Some things like CAD drawing files you will inevitably lose in due to the lack of any computer that will run the old software, so you have to transfer them to other formats. I “print” drawings to PDF, so it will remain viewable for quite a while, although lacking the underlying structure you might need when it’s time to update the drawing. Anything that’s usable as a text file (bill of material, software source code, etc.) is saved as plain ASCII text as well as the original format – ASCII has been around for 50 years, and I expect it’s good for another 50.
I think I get it; each tool/robot has its RS232 pins ticked directly, and uniquely, by the control software written just for it. And the interface software was never migrated up to newer OSs.
Did C3-P0 have an RS232 port? Maybe that was R2-D2… ;)
I never looked up their asses to see.