Tony Duell wrote: Well, the article looked like they used 75160/75161 as the GPIB bus driver pair. IIRC, if you used 75160/75162, then the HPIB side could be a bus controller. Of course, the hardware here is very simple, and all the smarts are in the microcontroller, so though a "Simple Matter Of Programming" you could have commands from the HPIB going on to USB peripherals or reverse with the original hardware, or you could have a master on the HPIB bus with the other driver chip... One interesting point is that with the new USB-enabled microcontrollers, you could make the solution even smaller... Philips, ST Micro, and Fujitsu all have fairly capable microcontrollers with and ARM-7 core, flash, sram, several parallel I/O ports, and a USB2.0 compatible controller on the die, that would be pretty handy for this sort of application. (The USB2.0 interface on the current batch of chips is USB2.0 _compatible_, but won't run in the fast mode, so you still only get 12MBPS) Bill

I thought the GPIB side already was a controller. Surely it's not a mailbox (to use the HP terminology) to link a GPIB controller to a USB host. I thought you could use the 75161 as the control buffer for a controller, btu there was something you couldn't then do (is it pass control to another device ?) But I would have to check the data sheet to be sure. My worry is in the very asymmetric (logically) nature of the USB interface. I haven't really looked at it, but I've got the impression that moat of the micorcotnrollers with USB interfaces can only be used as slave devices, and that rather more smarts are needs to make a host. If not, and you can use one of these microcontrollers to talk to USB peripherals, I am going to have to give it a go. As if that would be a problem in this application :-) -tony

But this is classiccmp.... I have many machines, even pocket-sized machines, which can act as HPIB controllers. I haev nothing that can take a USB port (and you must admit if you could design something to work the other way, even for a limited subest of USB peripherals, there would be a certain hack value in having a USB-capable HP9830...) -tony

In article <00ec01c62e0e$b0912580$5b01a8c0 at pc1>, "a.carlini at ntlworld.com" <arcarlini at iee.org> writes: I have an CBM 8050 drive and it would be very helpful for data interchange if I could hook that up to a PC through some sort of IEEE-488 interface. Does anyone know of one that will work with this drive? Apparently the NI cards don't work so well... -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

I played around for a while with an MSD IEEE-488 drive (intended for Commodore), using an IBM [8 bit] IEEE-488 board. There are people using some of the cheap Commodore drives with PC parallel ports. (is that using the IEC port of the drive? is it still called IEC?)

Tony Duell wrote: It's actually a HPIB controller which is controlled over USB. http://lsd.fe.uni-lj.si/gpib/ They are working on a kit...Which is good because the 75162 is generally available in DIL anymore... Thanks, Maurice