Acceleport USB serial port compatibility information.


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Acceleport USB serial port compatibility information. Acceleport USB serial port compatibility information.

On the Macintosh:

We should be compatible with most devices such as PDAs, modems, digitizing tablets, process control, etc.. In particular, any serial application developed with The Communication ToolBox should work fine.

The Communication ToolBox is the API for Applications to communicate with serial ports. The Comm Toolbox is now built into Open Transport (which is the API for networking and communication). Before the Comm Toolbox, there was just the Serial Manager. There are basically three classes of applications that work with our USB serial ports under MacOS. These devices will communicate in one of the following ways:

Communicate directly with the UART.

Use the Serial Manager and assume that the only serial ports are the Modem Port and the Printer Port.

Use the Communication Toolbox to find a serial port and communicate with it.

In the first case, these products can generally be identified by what software is installed with it. If the product wants to install a Control Panel called "Serial Switch" then more than likely that application wants direct access to the UART and will NEVER work on an iMac.

In the second case, these products can generally be identified by which ports the user is allowed to select from when choosing a port to connect the serial device to. Somewhere in the application, there will be some place to pick which port the application should be able to talk to its device through. If the list of choices only contains the Modem Port and Printer Port, then the application has assumed that there are only two serial ports and there will never be more or less. The only way to support these products is to implement the "printing hack". From what we have seen, most (or all) printers fall into this category. A couple of subgroups to this category are those devices which require external clocking, or that have some other specific dependency on the Modem and Printer ports.

The last case includes most products which have been made in the last couple of years. Modem communication works great. 3Com Palm products work great. Game controllers should also work great.

On the PC:

Any software or driver which bypasses the operating system's native programming interface will fail on anything but the chips on the motherboard. However, this is fairly unusual for most serial devices and applications... especially current versions of them. Overall interoperability and compatibility with our serial ports should be very good to excellent.