USB adapter or serial adapter?

[Brandon]

I have been using the serial adapter for two years now and it works great but now I am pushing 256 channels and I was just wondering if the serial adapter would experience any kind of lag with that many channels, and I didn't know if I should get the USB adapter or not.

thanks.

[Guest wbottomley]

Both adapter basically do the same thing.

The difference between the two are the USB booster can power ELL's as the serial cannot. Also to mention... the USB adapter can be connected to a laptop or pc that does not have a serial port.

[Tim Fischer]

From what I understand, the software essentially treats the USB device as a virtual serial port anyway. I think you'll be fine with your 9-pin serial adapter as long as the PC you use has such a connector on it...

-Tim

[Brandon]

hey thanks for the input. very helpful.

[LightORamaDan]

I agree with all the comments above. A serial port may actually be a little "faster" than USB in that with USB, the data has to be first transmitted on the USB then translated to RS232 and re-transmitted. The actual end speed is the same on the LOR network.

If you notice any appreciable time lag in your network try adjusting the network speed. That can be accomplished via the Sequence Editor --- Edit->Preferences->NetworkPreferences ... The default speed is 57K while the top speed is 115k .. The higher the speed the more likely that a big network with lots of connections and longer cable runs will have some type of communications problem so it is sort of a catch22. In general we have see 115K run well on large networks.

Dan