designing in USB-serial ports, was Re: Hans Camenzind, Inventor of the 555, dies.

He ws jsut repoprting what he was told when it was given to him. He is most certianly not a moron, he's a darn good embedded systems programmer. He had no use for it (which actually suprised me), but he knew I'd use it...

FWIW. Black Box still sell the thing (DT200A) at a very high prise... Things I didn't mention about it. It's got a Dallas RTC chip in it. When I got it. There are 2 RS232 connectors, male and female, wired pin-pin (alas it can't intercept and modify the data). Pins 2 and 3 are monitored by tehe 2 channels of the Z8530, there's a relay [1] that conencts a driver to pin 2, so the thing can run as a terminal. There's another DB25 socket on the other side of hte case. It's wired -- mostly -- as a PC parallel port, you can sue thing unti to test parallel printers or use such a printer to log the incoming data. Note I said 'mostly'. One pin is an RS3-level output from one of th Z180's serial ports, another pin is used as a serial input. This lets you control the thing remotley. There was supposed to be an adapter included with it for this (it's not just wires, there's a resistor -- I guess 4k7 -- in series with the incloming data line). I didn't get it, but I soon figured it out. [1] There are 4 relays on the PCB. They are bistable latching relays controleld by a '374 chip, each relay coil is tied between 2 of the Q pins of said chip, so you can energise it either way round to flip the relay one way or the other. The 4 rleays control ; Main power on/off ; TxD output to Rs232 pin ; TxClock output to RS232 pin (used in syncrhonous modes) ; RTS on. There is one bit of poor design IMHO. The firmware allows you to select a lot of bauyd rates, includign some obscure ones that I would never need, but it on;y goes down to 75 baud. And the thing can handle 5 bit Baudot data (well, probably not true Baudot, but you know what I mean). Having 50 baud or 45.45 baud would be useful for that.