[time-nuts] TBOLT communication

Neville Michie namichie at gmail.com
Wed Sep 24 08:58:24 UTC 2008


Hi,
I have just spent a week or two trying to talk to a Trimble Thunderbolt.
I have a laptop running VISTA, about which there is little to say.
The laptop has no serial ports, but I have some USB/Serial converters  
that successfully run
my HP 3815A and a Samsung GCRU/D, and also communicate with my HOBO  
loggers.
The USB/Serial converters are a little difficult to use, sometimes  
hanging, necessitating
unplugging and plugging back in. They get assigned to various Port  
numbers but tend to keep
the same number from day to day. The ports can be configured in the  
management function.
However the TBOLT refuses to talk to the converter, to the extent  
that I thought that I must have
damaged the TBOLT.
Today, as a last resort, I remembered an old PC, dragged it out and  
stoked it up, and to my delight
the TBOLT monitoring program ran without difficulty under Windows  
2000 with a conventional serial port.
Now I vaguely remember talk about RS232 communications and the need  
for pull up or down
resistors and supplies, but searching the archives I could find  
nothing relevant.
Can anyone tell me how I could run the TBOLT off a USB/Serial converter?
cheers, Neville Michie




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