bhays Posted February 6, 2010 Share Posted February 6, 2010 I have been meaning to add RDS for two years now, but finally switched my PCS Electronics transmitter and separate stereo encoder for an EDM LCD unit.Since my transmitter is located out in my garage and the show computer is inside the house in the office I was looking for a solution other than running a serial cable 60+ feet through my crawlspace. My network hub for the house is located in the garage near the transmitter, so I went with a Serial Over IP adapter. The StarTech unit I am using sets up really quickly and works great.http://www.startech.com/item/NETRS2321E-1-Port-RS-232-422-485-Serial-over-IP-Ethernet-Device-Server.aspxIf your transmitter is in a different room than your show computer but you don't have a wired network port near it, you could use a wireless game adapter and do the same thing on your wireless network. Attached files Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavBro Posted February 7, 2010 Share Posted February 7, 2010 That's funny, I used to use those devices to run VT100 terminals (which were serial devices) over ethernet. Back in the day, these were called Terminal Servers, before that term was re-purposed to mean remotely controlling a Windows session. We had 8 and 16 port versions of these that would multiplex lots of serial channels into a single ethernet cable run. Cool stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bhays Posted February 7, 2010 Author Share Posted February 7, 2010 On that scale we used to run Livingston Portmasters when I first started my ISP back in the mid nineties. They were 30 ports each.More recently, we used these one port versions in a wireless isp venture I had. We made a deal with a water company to let us place access points on their water towers and used these to let them remotely monitor the water level in the tanks.Works great and I was NOT feeling like dragging through the crawlspace to run another cable out there yesterday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomskillman Posted February 7, 2010 Share Posted February 7, 2010 I use one for my LED sign. My show PC is in the basement and my LED sign is the living room window. Works great to redirect the serial port for the LED sign over ethernet and there is already a cable in the living room anyway... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bhays Posted February 13, 2010 Author Share Posted February 13, 2010 ********** UPDATE - WARNING - UPDATE ***********Turns out, this won't work. The MiniRDS and the EDM transmitter with the MiniRDS built in communicate synchronously vs standard serial communication which is asynchronous.. apparently no serial over IP adapter can deliver synchronous communication.The MiniRDS software said it connected to the port and sent data, but when I was able to locate an RDS radio for testing I found out it wasn't working.I am working on a USB over IP solution using a usb-serial adapter and I will update this thread when I have something working.I didn't want anyone to waste time/money going down this particular dead end road. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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