On 2014-06-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
I meant could the USB to IEEE-488 interfaces be talked to with
something other than Windows systems. I actually have a PCI
IEEE-488
board in one linux box, but I would like to also have some IEEE-488
communications from my Sun Blade 2000 systems.
Second-hand office PCs with XP still installed or freshly reloaded are
cheap (or free) and work fine without updates or antivirus as lab
instrument controllers. I recently paid $25 for a fully functional
wide-screen, dual core laptop with XP which I turned into an HDTV
recorder.
If I were to do that everywhere I wanted to talk IEEE-488, I
would get rid of the Windows and install Linux (which is what I have
done with the one system so configured at the moment). It came with
Windows 7 installed, FWIW. But I don't like leaving Windows systems on
the net (even just the local one behind the firewall) and powered on
full time.
Being the standard, everything is available for them without the fuss
of adding hardware to a Mac or unix system. Check the number and type
of expansion slots since they may not have as many, especially PCI-E,
as a home machine. You can back up or clone the operating system
partition and not worry about reinstalling it.
The system with the IEEE-488 card in it (and working with it) is
an IBM/LeNovo ThinkCenter, and since I only needed the one slot for that
card, it even still has a spare slot (That one is PCI-X IIRC).
My 1999-vintage 400 MHz datalogging laptop runs Windows 2000, with
Internet Explorer 6 and Adobe 7 to read documentation and OpenOffice
2.0 to crunch the data. The COM and USB port expanders plug into the
CardBus slot. I still use it because it's no big loss if I snag a
cable and it falls and breaks. It's an example of the minimum that's
still useful.
And it is kept from talking to the outside world, I would hope. :-)
One of the extra things which I would like to talk to --
directly from the Sun machines if possible -- is a Nikon LS-3500
film/slide scanner. It is the one which is the reason that the
subsequent ones were called "CoolScan" -- as it really could cook the
film. :-)
The two choices for interfacing on it are the IEEE-488 and
RS-232. And given that a full resolution scan produces a 72 MB image,
9600 baud rather throttles it severely. 20.83 hours per image -- plus
whatever overhead is needed to do that all. :-)
And yes -- I have a much newer Nikon film/slide scanner which
does talk USB -- but I really want to see how fast I can make this work.
I first used it with a Windows 3.11 system, and it took forever. The
first third of an image went moderately fast for the time (with a NI
GPIB board) and then (since it insisted on keeping the image in memory
until the scan was complete -- and there was not room for that much
memory in that motherboard -- it started swapping.) It took an hour to
scan the image. a half hour to save it once scanned, fifteen minutes to
copy it over 10 MHz ethernet to a unix box, and about three mintutes to
copy between the unix boxen -- so I really don't have pleasant memories
about Windows in association with this. :-)
Thanks,
DoN.
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