I need a usb3 to rs232 adapter that WORKS RIGHT

Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Many thanks,

-T

In article , wrote:

Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

all of the usb-serial adapters i've tried work without any issue,
including noname cheapos. the usual chipset is a prolific 2303.

T wrote:

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Never had any problems with the genuine FTDI ones, I think this link is
correct for a leftpond supplier

https://brtchip.com/product/us232r-100

T wrote:
Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

So you probably will have to find a very 'dumb' *printer* driver,
which uses the handshaking protocol - Xon/Xoff, Enq/Ack, etc. - which
the CNC machine needs. Finding such an 'outdated' driver on/for Windows
10 might not be easy.

Many thanks,

YW.

In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.

On 08/08/2019 22.08, nospam wrote:
In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.

But they lack the hardware interrupt line (IRQ) a real hardware rs232
interface provides on the personal computer. Although the USB interface
is faster, the time to respond, although small, is unpredictable and
variable, and typically longer than on real hardware rs232 port.

Also, the hardware handshake lines of the rs232 interface are missing or
have to be emulated in software.

These issues impact GPS accuracy, and may impact other uses. If CNC
stands for Numerical control (CNC) (also computer numerical control
(CNC)), then it might be an issue if it needs real time control.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

T wrote:
Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Many thanks,

-T

http://www.usconverters.com/usb-serial-adapter-xs880

Mine is about is about 10 years old and has been with me from
Mexico to the Arctic Circle and on 4 laptops.
The data and power lights are a necessity.
It is USB2 though. None of our monitoring equipment uses USB3x.
Don't know why anyone would need USB3 for equipment.

On Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:08:33 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.

+1

My team and I use usb-serial adapters every day to administer
Enterprise-grade networking equipment via their Console ports. The brand
of the adapter doesn't seem to matter at all. They all just work. I've
never picked one up that didn't work. It's just a standard rs232 port.
There's no special protocol that the adapter itself needs to understand
or support.

On Thu, 8 Aug 2019 22:20:41 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 08/08/2019 22.08, nospam wrote:
In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.

But they lack the hardware interrupt line (IRQ) a real hardware rs232
interface provides on the personal computer. Although the USB interface
is faster, the time to respond, although small, is unpredictable and
variable, and typically longer than on real hardware rs232 port.

Also, the hardware handshake lines of the rs232 interface are missing or
have to be emulated in software.

IMHO, you're seriously over thinking things.

These issues impact GPS accuracy, and may impact other uses. If CNC
stands for Numerical control (CNC) (also computer numerical control
(CNC)), then it might be an issue if it needs real time control.

A CNC machine is essentially a plotter. You're sending a series of
commands that ends with a command to execute. After that, the machine
goes to work. There's no real time control, at least not that I've ever
seen. Once executed, the machine goes to work and lets you know when it
has finished. It's not like you're sitting there, trying to guide it
with a joystick.

T wrote:
Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Many thanks,

-T

There would be ones based on FTDI, FTDI counterfeits
and Prolific based ones.

This Prolific managed to earn 4.5 stars.

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Proli.../dp/B0758B6MK6

FTDI examples. (We know it's not a counterfeit
because we're on the FTDI site.)

https://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables/USBRS232.htm

*******

They follow a common design.

https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Doc...-schematic.pdf

The chip in the center, is a CMOS USB to TTL-level serial chip.
(In the case of an FTDI counterfeit, a chinese microcontroller
chip of some sort takes center spot.)

The chip on the right, can be a Bipolar level shifter chip.
It converts 0 to 5V logic signals and makes -12V to +12V
outputs with current limiting (short circuit protection).

In USB dongles, only +5V is available, yet the level shifter
chip needs V+ and V- to run the bipolar RS232 levels
(+/-3V signals to +/-25V signals, with traditional
PCs using the +/-12V rails on the ATX supply for
mid-range amplitude swings.) The right-hand chip
does this by having "charge pumps". A charge pump
circuit can make an elevated voltage, but at the
expense of being "as weak as ****" on output current.
C8 and C10 in the circuit, would have somewhere from
+9V and -9V to perhaps a bit more on them. (I've never
scoped those for a look.) At one time, they were using
1uF ceramics, but over the years they've put cheaper
ceramic caps in there.

One consequence of this, is a USB dongle for the task,
probably isn't a good candidate for driving really long
cables.

The level shifter used on a motherboard, has no charge
pump and it runs directly off an ATX-supply provided V+ and V-.
My newest motherboard uses something like this.

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/gd75232.pdf

An engineer at work, he claimed the non-charge-pump
version he put in a piece of equipment, worked properly
up to about 70Kbaud. And could drive a long line up
to that speed. There were no adventurous claims
about "running at 1megabit" or the like. And the application,
where the equipment would be positioned in a relatively large
room, it's quite possible an extremely long cable would be
used and the "strength" of the design would be "tested".
(In some physical plants, 500 feet would not be abnormal.)
We used to provide optoisolated versions for customers
too, exactly why I don't know. But there are people
who take their miserable RS232 ports seriously :-)
With the optoisolated ones, you can run copper cable
between buildings, where the building ground might be
slightly different, without fear of screwing up the
signal levels or something.

I have no direct experience with designing in RS232,
just the usual kooky contact with people who know
how to do that stuff. (You know what engineers are like.)

The nine pin interface has every signal you would
expect on a nine pin interface. These are *more*
than just TX/RX/GND adapters. They have the usual
flow control signals. And the USB end, being USB,
is polled by the computer, and USB packets are
handled as events on the computer end. Again,
it works like any other USB item.

The controller chip implements a "standard" UART,
like a 16550 or whatever, complete with small
TX and RX buffer. This gives the device some
service resilience, so that if it takes 200us
for the USB to be serviced, no data is lost.
If the designers thought the device would take
longer to get serviced, they would increase
the depth of the FIFOs inside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART

https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Doc.../DS_FT232R.pdf

FIFO RX Buffer (128 bytes)
FIFO TX Buffer (256 bytes)

So you can see there, that the FIFO is *significantly*
larger than a 16550. And knowing the max baud rate,
and doing the math, you could figure out what
they think the service interval is.

Even sound cards have a buffering scheme, where
the requirement is that the buffering cannot
be so large that it screws up lip-sync. At
least some of that buffer will use system memory
(and when your game crashes, the same buffer
is re-fetched, over and over again). Of course,
games don't crash with exactly the same symptoms
as they used to have.

Paul

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:


Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.

But they lack the hardware interrupt line (IRQ) a real hardware rs232
interface provides on the personal computer. Although the USB interface
is faster, the time to respond, although small, is unpredictable and
variable, and typically longer than on real hardware rs232 port.

Also, the hardware handshake lines of the rs232 interface are missing or
have to be emulated in software.

as long as they work, there won't be a problem.

These issues impact GPS accuracy, and may impact other uses. If CNC
stands for Numerical control (CNC) (also computer numerical control
(CNC)), then it might be an issue if it needs real time control.

gps would be an nmea stream over serial and its accuracy unaffected, at
least by the data connection. if the gps is being used indoors, it may
not get a good fix, but that has nothing to do with the serial port.

cnc would be sending commands, presumably by cnc software that expects
an rs232 port.

tl;dr - it should work just fine.

nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.
the usb-serial adapters i've used provide a standard rs232 port, which
i used to talk to the console ports on old upses, a managed switch and
a gps, among other devices.
But they lack the hardware interrupt line (IRQ) a real hardware rs232
interface provides on the personal computer. Although the USB interface
is faster, the time to respond, although small, is unpredictable and
variable, and typically longer than on real hardware rs232 port.

Also, the hardware handshake lines of the rs232 interface are missing or
have to be emulated in software.

as long as they work, there won't be a problem.

These issues impact GPS accuracy, and may impact other uses. If CNC
stands for Numerical control (CNC) (also computer numerical control
(CNC)), then it might be an issue if it needs real time control.

gps would be an nmea stream over serial and its accuracy unaffected, at
least by the data connection. if the gps is being used indoors, it may
not get a good fix, but that has nothing to do with the serial port.

cnc would be sending commands, presumably by cnc software that expects
an rs232 port.

tl;dr - it should work just fine.

At high baud rates, there are two flow control
schemes, and you have to select one of them.

Flow control schemes help prevent data loss.

The hardware flow control lines are available
on a USB to RS232 dongle.

And not available on a "cellphone style"
USB to three wire TTL level TX/RX/GND adapter.

There is also an in-band flow control scheme (XON/XOFF)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_flow_control

Paul

In article , Paul
wrote:

At high baud rates, there are two flow control
schemes, and you have to select one of them.

flow control exists at all bitrates and no need to select anything.

Frank Slootweg wrote in news:qii5pp.344.1@ID-
201911.user.individual.net:

T wrote:
Hi All,

I have a customer with a Mac and a w10 laptop and a CNC machine
with an RS232 (only) interface. He wants to be able to send
text files to the CNC machine. The Mac has USB3 and Thunderbolt
interfaces on the back. The W10 laptop has usb3 ports.

Now I could go the the various accessories sites and get
such an adapter, but they are typically trash and don't
work for beans. The customer did state this was his
experience. (Mine too.)

Any one know of a USB3 to RS232 adapter THAT ACTUALLY
WORKS RIGHT?

Very likely the problem is not that the adapter does not work, but
that such adapters are normally intended to drive peripherals such as
printers, not CNC machines.

So you probably will have to find a very 'dumb' *printer* driver,
which uses the handshaking protocol - Xon/Xoff, Enq/Ack, etc. - which
the CNC machine needs. Finding such an 'outdated' driver on/for Windows
10 might not be easy.

Many thanks,

YW.

One issue that hasn't been raised is the pin assignments on the CNC
machine. On the older UPS I have (~10 yrs or so) there is an DB25 port
for talking to control software on a PC. Unfortunately, the vendor
decided to not use that standard RS-232 pin assignments in favor of a
custom cable of thier own. This brings homw the point that just because
it is a DB25 or DB9 socket does not necessarily mean that it is RS232
compliant.
Does the documentation for your CNC machine have a pinout for that
connector? It always pays to verify instead of assuming.

On Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:26:28 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

A CNC machine is essentially a plotter. You're sending a series of
commands that ends with a command to execute. After that, the machine
goes to work. There's no real time control, at least not that I've ever
seen. Once executed, the machine goes to work and lets you know when it
has finished. It's not like you're sitting there, trying to guide it
with a joystick.

That's not always the case. It would help to know what the machine is
and whether the problem is the downloading of a control program or the
direct control of the machine.


There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

Eric Stevens