Hi USB ties you into the same silly PC driver two year life silly stuff. The bus has a lot of staying power, but keeping the stack up to date is a pain. Even for so called "standard" parts that interface to a "common" interface - neither one really turns out to be true. I have a big bucket full of serial adapters that were standard parts under XP. No drivers to install, just plug and play. Under the more modern stuff - no driver available. The gizmos are now Christmas ornaments.
Bob On Dec 19, 2010, at 10:35 AM, jimlux wrote: > Gerhard Hoffmann wrote: >> Am 19.12.2010 05:52, schrieb Bob Camp: >>> The real thing you would learn about is writing code that runs an FPGA. >> Yes. A good starting point would be a Xilinx SP605 kit. >> It's about the $750 for a decent 5370 and includes >> many points from Bobs option list. >>> The other gotcha here is that the feature list can get pretty large: >>> >>> >>> 3) USB 2.0 interface >>> 4) RS-232 interface >>> 5) HPIB emulation of an HP box (w/o drivers) >>> 6) Ethernet interface >>> 1) Web server software >>> 1) Front pannel controls (W/o mechanic) >>> 2) Front pannel display (VGA output) >>> 3) Front interface connections (DUT's) >>> 4) Rear pannel standard interfaces and controls (w/o mechanics) >>> 2) Flash card storage >>> 3) USB stick storage >>> 4) SD card storage >>> 5) Battery backed RAM storage >>> 1) Some number of counter inputs ( some programmable SMA I/O) >>> 2) Some number of reference inputs >>> >>> 1) Battery power >>> 2) Auto 12 V power >>> 3) AC line power >> use as a PCIE card in a pc or mac > > > I hate cards that plug into a PC. The PC bus respin cycle is much too short, > and you have device drivers, etc. to worry about. At work, we use rack > mounted PCs to control a bunch of test equipment. Since we're doing > spacecraft stuff, the "design use life" of the rack is 2-3 years, but it will > be used beyond that, and often, will get reused for the next project. > > I've spent way too many hours hunting for another ISA bus machine, or trying > to resurrect NT4.0, because there's no device drivers for anything newer. > > In my book, RS232 is fine for low end, Ethernet is even better, USB looks > pretty good and has some staying power. Folks implementing things on USB > tend to use simple conceptual models (e.g. emulated serial port). > > My only gripe about USB is that it's a very master/slave sort of thing. > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
