[Coco] DriveWire 3

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 04 April 2009, Roger Taylor wrote:
>Boisy, since DW3 is not a sale product I decided to bring this to
>your attention on the list like everyone does with my software
>issues.  It tends to help to get a collection of opinions.
>
>First, let me mention that I sell HQ bitbanger cables.  I test them
>not only at 115200 bps, but at twice that speed using a certain
>person's unannounced bitbanger routines.  Not only that, but my
>cables are tested using an IOGear USB to Serial adaptor.  With that
>being said, I doubt that my cables are the reason I'm having trouble with
> DW3.

Let me interject here that the usb-serial adapter the shack, and lots of 
others sell, will often be based on the pl-2303 chipset.  Those are absolute 
poison.  We found that out on the heyu list, they are fond of throwing away 
the first byte of a data packet.  I have NDI who's chipset is in the IOGear 
adapter though.  FTDI based adapters such as this discovery stanza from my 
dmesg:

[    4.200716] usb 1-10.2: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and 
address 8                                                         
[    4.296718] usb 1-10.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001                                                            
[    4.296774] usb 1-10.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, 
SerialNumber=3                                                       
[    4.296858] usb 1-10.2: Product: USB FAST SERIAL ADAPTER
[    4.296911] usb 1-10.2: Manufacturer: FTDI <--- the important part
[    4.296963] usb 1-10.2: SerialNumber: FTOOS09N <-- could be anything
[    4.297073] usb 1-10.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice                                                                          

Are completely transparent. So if any of you are trying to use a pl2303 based 
adapter, bin it, yard sale it, whatever and get real stuff.  Life is too short 
to fight with broken hardware like that.

[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Help!  I'm trapped in a PDP 11/70!