At 08:16 AM 3/17/2004 -0500, you wrote:
Most any USB - serial adapter should work with the Orion. They emulate
the old-fashioned serial port pretty well. From what I hear, you only run
into problems if you are using the serial line in exotic timing-dependent ways.
I had different experience with mine, but they may have improved the
quality since I bought mine.
For a radio manufacturer, USB seems like a no-brainer. It's probably as
cheap as serial, and what percent of user PCs don't have USB in the Orion
/ IC-7800 market? Even better, I would like Ethernet (or WiFi??) as an
easy way to work the radio over longer distances and from multiple
computers. (That's the jack to watch on the '7800.)
Well, I'm a Linux device driver writer. At the moment I'm writing one
for the USB488 subclass -- an implementation of IEEE488 over USB.
It isn't easy. USB is extremely complex for the driver writer. Unlike
other protocol stacks, USB almost always requires a device driver for a
new class of devices to be attached to a computer.
So for radio developers, there are two choices: Imitate an existing
class, such as Serial or HID (Human Interface Device) and use the
existing drivers, or develop a class specifically for radios and then
wait for the drivers to be available on your platform.
So, for a while, Linux users and Mac users will be out in the cold, then
they will have to deal with substandard interfaces.
The point of all this is that, for serial devices, no kernel-level code
has to be written and the code can be ported (depending on how it was
written) between operating systems. USB *seems* easy to the end user,
but it puts a great deal of pain and suffering on the developer.
Having seen the innards of the protocol, I can't say I have a great
deal of respect for USB.
73,
Eric, KB0YDN
--
Eric F. Richards
efricha@dimensional.com
"The weird part is that I can feel productive even when I'm doomed."
- Dilbert
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