[Coco] serial cable tricks for drivewire?

[Aaron Wolfe]

You can get quite a good distance with USB, and then only use a serial
adapter and serial cable for the last X feet.  You might find it's
reliable at some ratio between the two (neither usb or serial can do
the full 50 ft on their own most likely).
Also, serial to IP (ethernet) conversion allows hundreds of feet via
ethernet.  You can find old termservers or cisco routers capable of
serial<->ip cheap on ebay.  Some have lots of serial ports.  I picked
up a 16 serial port box for $30.
One last note, the DW4 server also allows multiple cocos and disk image sharing.

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Robert Hermanek
<rhermanek at centurytel.net> wrote:
> I have a number of coco's connected to a single server via serial cables and drivewire.  The drivewire server in this case is an application I wrote myself to be compatible with DW3 HDB-DOS, and since it allows multiple coco's to access the same DSK images simultaneously, it makes it easy to swap files between coco's, i.e. build program in Edtasm on one machine, swivel chair and execute it on another...
>
> Sounds great, but the downside to my setup is that the server is located far away from some of my coco's, and in one case I end up with a serial cable that is 50+ feet long.  This connection is not reliable at 115k baud.
>
> I'm guessing 50+ feet (with no hardware flow control) is well beyond the official maximum length of a serial cable.  Does anyone know of any tricks to allow longer serial cable connections to function? i.e., better connectors, different cable, things like that?
>
> -Robert Hermanek
>
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