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I’ve been in a flash programming mood the last year, so I begged my wife for some flash programming software. The only problem I found was that there wasnt anything within a resonable price that worked well. I found several programs that were free for testing. But none of those really worked well with all of their bugs. To get to the point, I found Swish and tried their free trial. Then I bought SwishMax. Swish is a whole universe of flash programming software. I advise all who dare to check it out. The free trial lasts 30 days.

While I was doing a bit of research on the FTDI and Prolific USB to Serial adapters provided by Sewell, I found some somwhat good news.

It turns out that FTDI has a beta driver available for Windows XP 64 bit edition. Not only that, but so does Prolific. Isn’t that so exciting!? Its been so frustrating trying to get a driver for XP x64. I’ve almost been tempted to write my own(which would be hard considering my programming experience is limited to Labview and Actionscript).

The FTDI driver can be obtained by emailing support2@ftdichip.com. In the email, specify whether you want either the D2XX or VCP driver. This driver can be compiled for AMD64 or IA64 processors.

The Prolific driver is made for PL-2303H, PL-2303HX, and PL-2303X. Click here to download the prolific driver.

Well I have finished the final testing with Sewell USB to Serial adapters and National instruments Labview. As expected, the adapters were recognized immediately. Since NI makes several solutions that use Serial port for communication, so I tested the adapters with NI’s Measurement and Automation Explorer software.

To configure the Sewell USB to Serial adapters to work with Labview:

1. Plug in adapters
2. Install the drivers for the adapters
3. Open up your computer’s device manager
4. Look under the ports section (you should see a device with USB and Serial in the Title) for the com port number assigned to the adapter
5. Open Measurement and Automation Explorer
6. Expand Devices and Interfaces folder
7. Expand Ports folder
8. Click on the Com Port that correlates with the com port listed in the device manager
9. From here you can test the com port with your device

The com port that is listed is the same port that your Labview program will list

So far I have tested two models of Sewell Direct’s USB to Serial adapters. These adapters use the prolific 2303 chipset, as well as the FTDI chipset. Both of these USB to Serial adapters worked great. They show up in the device manager as a com port. They also show up in the Measurement and Automation Explorer as a com port. They can be tested in the Measurement & Automation explorer.

Because several of Sewell’s products use these two chipsets, Labview will work with each of them. Below is a list of their products that have Prolific 2303HX chipset, as well as those with the FTDI chipset.

Prolific 2303HX:

USB to Serial Adapter
USB to Serial/Parallel/PS2 Adapter
USB 2.0 Mini Docking Station without Lan
USB 2.0 Mini Docking Station with Lan

FTDI:

USB to DB9 Serial Plug-in Adapter
USB to DB9 Serial Plug-in Adapter, 2 Port
USB 4 Port Serial Adapter
USB 8 Port Serial Adapter

With RS232 becoming an obsolete interface in the computer world, and still a living entity in the device world, more solutions are becoming available. One of these solutions is the USB to Serial adapter. Although I have been using Labview for a while, I havent had the opportunity to test it much with serial devices.

This week I’m going to try out a few chipsets with Labview. The adapters for these tests have been donated by Sewell Direct- a company that knows connectivity. I will be testing chipsets made by Prolific, FTDI, and Bafo. If any other chipsets have been tested, let me know.

Sound cards are powerful cards and should be utilized as such. They are easy to manipulate, and are relatively inexpensive.

I recently wrote a program with NI’s Labview 7.1. This program needed to output a square wave signal with a duration of 20ms. The signal needed to be manipulated from the front panel in amplitude, frequency, duration, and duty cycle. I found that I could make the 20ms wave at the right frequency, but for some reason, it wasnt a very accurate wave. Instead of having a constant peak and trough it started out high and went low. I talked to several Labview Technicians who tried with their might to help me build the right wave. The funny thing is that I was able to build the right wave through NI’s Signal Express, but we just couldnt be accurate with Labview itself.

Then one of the technicians suggested using a sound card for the application. We set it up using the sound vis and it worked great. They may not be as powerful as DAQ cards, but they are much more powerful then they look.

DAQ cards or Data Aquisition cards can be important for aquiring data for research, controlling external devices, and many other things. They are capable of timing in the millisecond range (maybe even smaller). The only problem with them is that they are expensive. If you are looking into getting DAQ boards, then you should consider getting them from National Instruments (NI). Not only does NI have great support, but the cards they sell last forever. Cards made by other companies are great too. They will perform all the same tasks, and some may even be better at it. However, NI’s cards will have less compatibility problems (less troubleshooting), and NI will always back them up.

Suse is another popular distribution of Linux. I was a bigger fan of Suse before Fedora came out. It ran smoothly. And I never ran into any problems while installing the OS, or doing a hard reset on the computer.

A Fedora is a type of hat. So, what better name could the free version of Redhat be then the name of a hat. I think its pretty cool myself. I have a copy of this distribution running on my computer right now, and it is pretty nice. I personally recommend Fedora to anybody that likes quality free stuff.