Netbooks and Serial Ports

[James Bond]

I'm in the market for a netbook. I've had my eye on the HP Mini's and Dell Mini's for a while now, and there's a good chance I'll get the Dell Mini 10 when they come out.

I'm a network engineer and I use the serial port on my current laptop fairly often... I suppose there is little to no chance that they will include a serial port on any of the upcoming netbooks?

Any cool features coming from netbooks in the near future that I may consider holding out for? (ie: is Asus' instant-on worth it?, etc)

 

[Brainonska511]

I doubt it. Many notebooks were already leaving serial ports off, so I doubt you'd see any on a netbook.

Your best bet if you want a netbook serial port would be to use a USB to Serial adapter, but those can be kind of iffy.

As far as cool features, I can't think of any. The instant-on one might be one to go for - after all, I'd want a netbook to quickly turn on so I can check my email/a few websites if I have a little time between classes or something.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you don't mind paying 2-5 times as much, there might be an import subnotebook at Dynamism.com that still includes a serial port.

What about a USB to serial convertor?

 

[ajaidevsingh]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
If you don't mind paying 2-5 times as much, there might be an import subnotebook at Dynamism.com that still includes a serial port.

What about a USB to serial convertor?

USB to serial convertor do not always work.. We tried to hook up a USB to serial convertor in collage to the server line via a db9 and got no where the reason was the way the usb device handled the requests.


So what we had to do was to buy a PCMCIA to serial converter and it works very well....!!

 

[IlllI]

they quit putting them in since about 1999 lol

 

[Emulex]

nah i have an atom based panasonic U1 it has a serial port. i think its an optional upgrade module that might increase the price but not significantly.

 

[recoil80]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
What about a USB to serial convertor?

USB to serial convertor can cause a lot of pain... I've been working with this kind of stuff for a while and eventually I switched to an old desktop pc to use a real serial port!
The linux drivers are not working 100% and you can have problems, in particular with flow control.
If you need to use a console it's fine, if you deal with a lot of data (I was working with an external modem) forget about it...
Maybe in Windows this kind of device work as they're suppose to do, I don't know...

 

[robphelan]

It's funny bc I'm building a touchscreen mp3 jukebox & my laptop doesn't have a serial port either. The USB to serial cable didn't work at all, so I'm looking for an inexpensive pcmcia serial card now

 

[Glob]

I'll 4th the USB-to-serial converter complaints. We have devices on our network that don't work properly with them, and the output in a terminal is just garbage. The company I work for gave everyone new laptops, and they don't have serial ports. It's been a bit of a disaster. A netbook with a serial port would surely be a good thing to have to carry around.

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: IlllI
they quit putting them in since about 1999 lol

Not sure if/when but you could still get a Dell laptop with a serial port as of about 1.5 years ago.

USB to RS-232 are hit and miss. The other option is PCMCIA or Cardbus, but I don't think netbooks have slots for those.


Link removed because I noticed it stated USB in the description...WTF?

 

[robphelan]

Originally posted by: Engineer

Originally posted by: IlllI
they quit putting them in since about 1999 lol

Not sure if/when but you could still get a Dell laptop with a serial port as of about 1.5 years ago.

USB to RS-232 are hit and miss. The other option is PCMCIA or Cardbus, but I don't think netbooks have slots for those.

Example (not an indorsement for the store, just a cheap one that Froogle popped up when searching).

dude.. thanks for posting that link... i found some on Ebay for ~20 shipped but didn't want to go that route.

I am a little cautious, though - the Elo touchscreen website says:

we recommend that the serial ports be true UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) devices. Typically this will be denoted in the product specification as a UART 16550. Beware of products that claim UART compatible or 16550 compatible.

Do you think that pcmcia card will do well?

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: robphelan

Originally posted by: Engineer

Originally posted by:
they quit putting them in since about 1999 lol

Not sure if/when but you could still get a Dell laptop with a serial port as of about 1.5 years ago.

USB to RS-232 are hit and miss. The other option is PCMCIA or Cardbus, but I don't think netbooks have slots for those.

Example (not an indorsement for the store, just a cheap one that Froogle popped up when searching).

dude.. thanks for posting that link... i found some on Ebay for ~20 shipped but didn't want to go that route.

I am a little cautious, though - the Elo touchscreen website says:

we recommend that the serial ports be true UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) devices. Typically this will be denoted in the product specification as a UART 16550. Beware of products that claim UART compatible or 16550 compatible.

Do you think that pcmcia card will do well?

1st - do a www.froogle.com search for PCMCIA RS232 and then select what you're comfortable with.

EDIT: I just noticed that the link I posted above states something about USB in the description. I would stay away from that one and I'll remove the link. You don't want anything USB in the title of an RS232 port, at least in my opinion.

As for function, they are "hardware" RS232 ports. They behave exactly the same way as a built in RS232 port (not the USB crap) and work great. Working in industrial automation, the USB craps out often (even killing a $2,000 touch screen for me once ), but never an issue with the PCMCIA RS232 cards, even the ones with 4 ports (in use at once). To be honest, I've never noticed if they were "compatable" uarts or the actual 16550 uart. Every single one that we have run (about 5 of them - various models - up to 4 ports per card) from the PCMCIA slot have functioned flawlessly!

 

[IlllI]

lol actually i was thinking parallel port for some reason heh

 

[robphelan]

i'm trying to find someone in the US.. but's that's not real easy

 

[robphelan]

any comments on this one?

 

[IlllI]

Originally posted by: robphelan
any comments on this one?

Oxford made/makes some good firewire chipsets

 

[Parasitic]

They don't make ExpressCard-serial port adapters do they?

The HP mininote comes with an ExpressCard slot so that could be nice.

 

[robphelan]

so, it looks like there are 2 versions of PCMCIA serial cards... 1) where the serial connection is located on the card and 2) the PCMCIA has a CAT5 connector that is fed by a CAT5 <-> serial cable.

I'm worried about the CAT5 <-> serial cable because I had 0 luck with the USB <-> serial cable.

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: robphelan
so, it looks like there are 2 versions of PCMCIA serial cards... 1) where the serial connection is located on the card and 2) the PCMCIA has a CAT5 connector that is fed by a CAT5 <-> serial cable.

I'm worried about the CAT5 <-> serial cable because I had 0 luck with the USB <-> serial cable.

Unlike the USB, the cat5 cable (or whatever it is) is a simple passthrough to the 9 pin Dsub RS232 connector. The USB has electronics downstream to change from USB to RS232. The only thing that I would worry about is something like the "USB" reference in the first link that I had posted. That leads me to belive that the card is a PCMCIA USB port providing RS232 through the cable. Obviously, we don't want USB involved, lol.

 

[robphelan]

Anyone know about uart specifications? The card I see supports 350 to 950 - does that include 16c550? Or is that 16550?