Leaderboard

I've used Digi devices for years, with few issues. Biggest system to date has four Etherlite 160's (total of 64 ports); sixty ports are tied to UUTs spewing 6400 char/sec each, all of which is digested by my LabVIEW application. The other four ports are used for instrumentation, doing query/response (a few dozen chars per message, as fast as the instrument responds). These terminal servers are setup to use the Digi RealPort driver, which provides standard Windows comm API, so VISA treats them like local asynch serial. When you get up to this level of activity, with array-launched VI clones, and lots of queue/notifier/event structure support, you have to be pretty careful about the details. Seemingly minor changes to cloned code, reentrancy settings, execution system assignment, etc can mean the difference between a working app and a quivering heap of unresponsive code. Dave

When I see that many ports needed, I gravitate towards the terminal server option. You will reach a point when you need multiple computer access to the ports or want to locate the computer(s) an extended distance from the UUTs. Yes, you could share the 8430 ports remotely through VISA, but I'll take a device that is designed to be left on for 24/7 for years over a Windoze / Antivirus / desktop PC (HD and RAM failures) combo that inevitably suffers a BSOD in the middle of a critical high utilization run. I've just switched out some very old Equinox terminal servers with the Perle IOLAN STS16 and they are very nice. I use both telnet and socket based connections to my UUTs without a problem. The price for either solution seems to be about the same.