Laptops with no serial ports

Nowadays no laptop is coming with serial port (D9), they only come with USB ports on it. Anyone has any idea how we are going to use them for communicating to PLCs and other serial devices?

I heard there are USB to serial convertors available in the market. How useful they are to communicate to say TSX Quatuam CPUs, Gateways etc. Any particular part no.??

And also any one used Toshiba satellite pro laptops in our work? Any comments on them?

Sorry guys, too many questions.

Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks.

In fact, there is one Croatian manufacturer still making laptops with serial port:
http://www.koncar-inem.hr/racunala/racunala/nada45.htm

Sometimes when you need a hardware handshake, you have problems with USB/Serial converter. We use Socket Ruggedized Dual Serial I/O PCMCIA Cards in several laptops (Dell, Toshiba...) and can use our PLC software with no problems.

KW

Belkin makes a very compact one that I've used with a number of devices. I've used a couple of others as well. The biggest thing that I've found is that if the manufacturer offers the option of using either their drivers or microsoft drivers - use the microsoft. Some of the software out there defaults to the microsoft names in the registry and will not find any other names - so you won't be able to find your comm port.

Davis Gentry

You've got options as long as your software plays nice with Windows ports.

Sometimes a DOS app will work when you go full-screen (Alt-Enter) with your command prompt window when they won't otherwise. If not, you're screwed.

Another option for Windows Apps is a PCMCIA serial card. I've got a Quatech one & it works great.

That is, of course, assuming you have a slot. PCMCIA seems to be going away as well. A number of killer-diller laptops don't even have them anymore.

Michal Casterline
Frakes Engineering

We ran into the same problem and have tried several different ones on several different serial devices, they work great as long as they handle 'ALL' the serial pins. Some that we have tried seem to act only as 3 pin serial connections (RX,TX,GND). Some of the PLCs require the other serial port pins to work as well.

I Use a Serial converter to communicate to Bejers OP-Panels and whit my first converter it worked but not that good, the transfers were sometimes aborted and even sometimes it was not possible to get any communication between the panel and the pc. But then i lost my cabel it i got a new one now and it works great! never any problem whit the beijer panels. But I still cant communicate wiht Siemens S5 wiht my new converter...

Usb-serial converters are good, well those made by good name brands.
Although, with sonme plc´s i´ve had some bad experiences. The best way i´ve heard of i a PCMCIA card, some call them replicators, which give you one or more serial ports, in a non serial port laptop. What i´ve done since i work with plcs is simply to by a laptop that comes with serial port, but if that is not good for you, i would recommend you to buy a PCMCIA card, 200 dollars last time i heard in argentina (maybe in US in cheaper)

Good Luck

All you need to do is buy a USB/RS232 converter. The trick is to buy one that powers the port of the device that you are trying to communicate with. Unfortuneately, this is easier said than done.

Go to http://www.keyspan.com and order the USA-19HS. I have never had a problem communicating with any PLC/RTU or any other device that I have needed to communicate with using a serial port.

There are still laptops that have a serial port. If people would only buy laptops that meet their needs, we wouldn't have problems with the duopoly deciding what we should have. I would return such an inadequate machine and buy one with a serial port. I just looked at Dell and found several I don't care for their machines that much, but they do have serial ports.

Regards
cww

I imagine that a PCMCIA serial port would be the cheapest and easiest way to go. USB serial adapters sometimes cause problems.

----
Nathan Boeger
http://www.inductiveautomation.com
Total SCADA Freedom

When I looked recently, HP was still selling laptops with one serial port.

You can still get laptops with serial if you ask for it, probably not of the shelve those.

Telemecanique sell an SR2CBL06 USB to serial convertor cable that works wirth Concept and Proworox. Must have Windows XP pro, or 2000. This cable is used inconjunction with the standard Quantum / momentum serial cable.

DELL still has some models with serial ports.
I have a D820 with a real serial port that works with Quantum PLCs

can't say about TSX, it may depend on the software package you're running. You may use USB/RS232 converters (or even Ethernet/RS232 converters if latency is not an issue) for simple communications, but if you are planning to use Siemens S5 package you'll need a true serial port providing proper interrupts. In that case, a PCMCIA card with RS232 port is the solution.

I recently evaluated the Dell Latitude (some colleagues of mine bought the D820 version) it comes with an on-board serial port. There's also a rugged (and expensive) version, the Dell Latitude ATG.

regards
Luca Gallina

Dell Latitude still comes with Serial port.

As for as experience with external serial port adaptors goes, USB to RS232 do work for some PLCs but not with all PLCs. PCMCIA serial port adaptor are the best bet for PLC applications.

Dear Sledrew,
Which type of PLCs have you tried?
The recommended USB- Serial Adapter is not externally powered but is bus powered?

My experience with USB serial port adapters is mixed. They seem to work OK most of the time but my PCMCIA serial port adapter works all the time EXCEPT that no USB or PCMCIA serial port adapter will work with the AB PIC driver. It will only work with a built in serial port. I guess they want to sell more USB to DH485 adapters instead of PIC modules.

In reply to Curt Wuollet: There is almost nothing outside of technical applications (such as automation) that uses RS-232C serial ports anymore. The same applies to parallel printer ports. Getting rid of both on laptops saves cost and board space and has no significant effect on overall sales of computers. Floppy disk drives are options on most PCs now and few people miss them (the main use these days seems to be for copy protection master disks). PCMCIA adaptors for laptops are probably destined to go the same way.

Once the hardware manufacturers have dropped the hardware, Microsoft will drop support for these features from MS-Windows. Alternatively, they may not intentionally "drop" the features, but the features may not work properly anymore after some future "MS-Windows update" and Microsoft won't see any reason to spend man hours fixing a problem that only affects a handful of people.

The longer term solution is going to be to find USB or Ethernet to RS-232C serial converters that work in these applications. Perhaps someone could start a wiki where we could put information like this?

In the meantime, a lot of maintenance departments simply mount an ordinary desktop PC on a tool cart. All the special cables, manuals, adaptors, dongles, etc. go in the drawers, and if they need battery power they just add a UPS.

If you need something portable and still want to use commodity components, you could use a small form factor PC (e.g. Mini-ITX or similar), keyboard, mouse (or trackball), and an LCD monitor. If you attached them all together somehow, you would have a "portable" at the same price as a desktop PC and still have one or two PCI slots (for short cards at least). It would look a bit odd, but it would work.

I think that a large part of our problems with the "duoploly" stem from the fact that we as engineers are a tiny percentage of the PC buying public. How many people currently buying PCs or laptops require RS-232 communication? Or require that an OS be supported for two or more decades? MS has dimished the support for bit operations in their IDEs for the last two iterations - which almost noone outside of the engineering world cares about. When is the last time an IT type was worried about doing a bitwise OR on the data coming across a serial port???

siggghhhhhhhhh

Davis Gentry