[AG-TECH] RS 232 control of cameras and projectors

[A Quay]

I'm at home and do not have the specific details, but for another
project we use a N Port Serial Pro (manufacturer?). This 1 rack unit
sized box has a NIC and 8 RS-232 serial ports. MS Windows can support up
to 8 of them, I believe. With the vendor supplied windows driver,
Windows sees the box as 8 standard com ports. Companies such as SIIG
have 8 port PCI cards.

Andy Quay

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon I Johansson [mailto:jon.johansson at ualberta.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 7:54 PM
To: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: [AG-TECH] RS 232 control of cameras and projectors


I'm thinking about connecting our cameras and projectors
to a computer and controlling them through RS-232 but
there seem to be some problems with that idea:

I have 4 computers with 2 serial ports each and 
10 serial connections to make -

   4 projectors
   4 cameras (sony VISCA)
   1 Gentner
   1 Switch

Ok, so the cameras are supposed to be able to be daisy chained
and I'm left with 7 connections to make. I would really like
to be able to control all of this stuff from a single machine
with two serial ports, is that possible? If it is possible,
is it worth the trouble? The cameras and projectors can be
controlled with remotes but the operator may be sitting too
far from a device for that to work.

My limited understanding of serial ports is that they are
pretty much dedicated to the connected device but maybe
there is a way around this?

If anyone has done this sort of thing I would appreciate
their comments.

Thank you,
Jon.

--
Jon I Johansson             *  Research Computing Support
jon.johansson at ualberta.ca   *  Computing and Network Services
Tel.: (780) 492-9304        *  University of Alberta
Fax.: (780) 492-1729        *  Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA