Serial to Parallel converter

Fair enough, but having to use an obsolete OS and being unable to run your program on a 64-bit platform (without a virtual DOS box) are high prices to pay IMHO. I recommend re-writing the program in a Windows BASIC (of course I'm prejudiced and would suggest BBC BASIC - there's even an automated QBASIC to BBC BASIC translator that will do most of the work). That would give you all the benefits you mention but with a modern OS and GUI.

Richard.

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Hmmm, the site has your name on top:
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Maybe. I'm also playing with Arduino C to build a weatherproof stand-alone datalogger.

The semiconductor design team I worked in started me with Visual Basic and only switched to QB so we could run our application boards on any customer's unmodified lab PC, off its printer port. In the late 90's hand-me-down office PCs weren't guaranteed to have USB ports but they still all had LPT1, plus the engineers liked using it for its simplicity. For instance it was trivial to make a full-featured I2C interface with it, one pair of control and status bits for Clock and another for Data, and the target's address asserted on the data bus.

I got good enough at QB graphics to draw the IC's layout on screen with the control bits we sent to it running around through shift registers to their intended locations. It looked like a video game battle of colored centipedes, and visually matched with test point locations seen through the microscope on a wafer prober.

The ICs were hot-swap controllers, Power-Over-Ethernet hubs, etc. sold by Texas Instruments.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins
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Not read all the thread, but I bring in data from our Mills and Lathes via RS232 using a computer with the Heidenhain free programme, TNCreoNT. Seems easy to me, download data, save file, open with WordPad, print !! Maybe I should read the whole thread !!! Bob

Reply to
Emimec

Thanks Bob but the file is hex encoded PCL1 data so cannot just be printed unless it goes to a printer that understands PCL1

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

It beats me why this is proving to be so so difficult. There's a very good terminal emulator program (Tera Term) for windows that has a binary logging facility. You can also select xon/xoff, hardware or no flow control. If you simply log the output to a file, then use the 'convert' utility from the ImageMagik package, you should be able to have something working within an hour.

Both the above packages are well proven and free:

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For pcl conversions, imagemagick may also need this:

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Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ

It's proving difficult because I'm looking for a simple hardware solution. A serial to parallel converter!!! Most respondants, including you ChrisQ are suggesting a software solution, but that's not what I seek. So far I have sourced two supposedly serial to parallel converters. Both have proved in fact to be parallel to serial, the third is a yet to be found - do you have it?

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

Looks like you have fixed the faults in any case, but if you want to get any job done, use all available tools, is the way I always approach such things. After all, the objective is to get the job done, but am just as bad myself, getting sidetracked to get a job done a preferred way :-).

If you haven't found one already, there was a simple design from years ago that used one of the old general instrument AY5-1013 standalone uart chips. Can't remember how much external logic was required, but probably only a baud rate generator and rs232 level conversion. The original idea cam from a GI app note and a google search should find it. No micros or programming, just the chip and a bit of added hardware...

Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ

Solved the logic analyser printing problem by getting a genuine serial to parallel converter from RS. (Silly money but this is a diversion off a project, not an aim in itself). Got the Micon 850 up and talking to me, now I'm fault finding on the tape subsystem. It uses a 250B data cassette deck by Memtec, illustrated on the bottom of this web page:

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Apparently used on Patriot missiles as well as my ancient Micon 850 controller ! So far found one interface line (FLUX 0) where both the driver in the rack and the receiver in the deck were kaput, but more lurks to be found as it still isn't writing.

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

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