PCI Serial port cards?

[Wombat]

Hey,
We could use some of these cards at work. There seems to be lots of people making/selling them though. Any recommendations? We'd like to have a PCI slot give us 2-4 RS232 sockets.

[spadnos]

I have two <A HREF= "http://www.byterunner.com">ByteRunner</A> cards, which are working flawlessly. One is an 8-port high speed (921.6Kbaud) serial card, the other a dual parallel. (I have way too many microcontroller/FPGA delvelopment systems for just two ports )

I have also used stuff from <A HREF= "http://www.blackbox.com">BlackBox</A>, but that was only their external RS485 related stuff, plus, they're very expensive.

- Steve

[rylan]

Have a couple siig pci serial port cards and those work great also.

http://www.siig.com/productList.asp?category=I/O

[Gurm]

SIIG stuff is generally pretty solid.

- Gurm

[spadnos]

Ah yes - I had forgotten about <A HREF="http://www.digi.com">Digi</A>. They've been in the business since the business began. I haven't used much of their serial stuff lately (the last was an 8-port ISA card), but their products are excellent. They are expensive, but good.

On a side note, they also have a line of ethernet-to-serial converters which are pretty neat (they bought NetSilicon a year or two ago).

- Steve

[Jon P. Inghram]

You shouldn't be using RS232 anyway, Microsoft says USB or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) is better.

[MultimediaMan]

I built up what turned out to be a 4 port print server for a guy with a pair of SIIG dual port parallel cards that worked great.

At a previous job we has a SIIG running a motion-control system using RS232 ports for unlatching plugs in a mold for a complex plastic part that worked flawlessly. The Mold Makers were placing bets it couldn't be done: the Rep from the Injection Molding Machine's Manufacturer got it working the first time. On a 33MHz 486...this was a Looong time ago.

[MultimediaMan]

The drivers for USB to RS232 are pretty stable. I've seen several high availability systems built up using these with older hardware. Places like unattended gas stations, and the like. They do work.

[Wombat]

The USB implementation on these boards tends to suck, though.

We're using Tyan Thunder 7501 Pro's, and their USB doesn't work right. Trying to figure out why, or if there's a fix.