USB to Serial Adapters

[Joethemechanic]

I am having troubles!!!

I just bought a new laptop, My old one needs a battery, is in horrible shape, and I cant get it to connect to My wireless internet.

I bought a Compaque Persario V2630US with XP Home edition on it.

The adaptor I have is one from DIY AutoTune,

You tried one of my USB converters and they didn't work? Was that with Megatune? You mentioned 'other' system... I tested the 'heck' out of these things and haven't had any reports of issues with MegaTune so I'm obviously curious....

I am running MSII 2.33 on a V3 board

I get comms, seems to always be on com 5, with the stimm hooked up I get good readings and eveything seems fine. That is until I got to work and tried to tune while the car was running. First thing I tried was to tweek the REQ Fuel, It would not work, then I went to the VE tuning screen, MT locked up in short order, wouldn't close, screen went dark (no comms ) with some fiddling I found that unpluging the adaptor would un-freese MT and it would re-connect. I could change some settings if I did it in time, but MT would eventually freeze, sometimes for good requiring a full system reboot. I was never able to reset REQ Fuel, this problem still exists even on the stim.

the Mega manual :

If you use a USB adapter, be SURE to set the buffer size to ZERO (0). You can change this in the Control Panel, look under 'System, Hardware, Device Manager'. The default buffer size for these adapters is typically 14 bytes. If this is the case with yours and you left the default, you would have no control over the data flow no matter what else you do

I looked exstensivly in controll pannel, system, hardware, devise manager, etc, nowhere could I find a " buffer size " setting.

I have treid messing with the

[MegaTune]
MTversion = 2.25

[Constants]
writeBlocks = off ; Default is on.
interWriteDelay = 1 ; Milliseconds delay after each byte when writeBlocks is "on".

settings, still no go.

I cant find the FIFO stuff mentioned either. problem persists, cant change some settings, cant run it on the car for long enough to even get a datalog... AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGG

Couple all of this with stubborn IRQ input issues That I cant seem to get resolved ( 3 or 4 entire threads devoted to that headache ) and I am starting to loath MSII and windows xp. I have read this entire thread, I am not an expert in windows, but I can find my way around somewhat.

Is there any hope???


I have just about givven up on the whole thing, 2 years of beta testing MS&Se, 1 laptop, ~$1500.00 worth of parts, a few hundred hours labor, hundreds of $$$ in gas, and now nothing but headaches for 3 months tring to get MSII work, all just to get My dads old el-comino to start good cold and get better fuel econimy......
Now My new $1000.00 laptop seems to be worthless for MS.........

any help is apriciated.
Thanks Joe

[milesinfront]

I gave up on USB2Serial a while back!

Get yourself a PCMCIA 2 Serial adapter....

You may still get some answers from the more experienced users also! Just do your best to keep your cool and work with the talent on this forum.

Don't worry, I've been where you are now and am quite sure a solution will be found...

[pipracer3185]

i have had simalar problems with mine, i have found that not all usb to serial adapters will work for whatever reason and i dont know why, i do know that if you go to radio shack and buy there usb to serial adapter and install the cd it will work like a charm. hope this helps

[2713ddddavid]

USB to Serial adapter from
http://www.pfranc.com/usb/usb.mhtml
Guarenteed to work or your $ back. The guy supports it in person (on the phone) no problem. You don`t end up talking to someone you can`t understand on the other side of the planet.

I received mine from Purple Computing (see the above link) installed it and the driver that they supply and the thing works perfectly. The cost was about $35 and that includes UPS 3 day air. I think its worth it.

[deviousKA]

Prolific based USB-serial adapters will work.

But you must have the most recent (2005) driver, the one sent with the unit does not work.

[gielamonster]

I bought a dual port Serial -> PCMCIA adapter off ebay recently and it ROCKS. I definitely recommend one especially because it was only $25 and you get two serial ports, so you can run the MS on one and something like a datalogger or wideband input on the other.

The card is a Silicom S2S, originally listed for $189...



http://www.silicom.co.il/pgx.php?p2=299
http://www.silicom-usa.com/cgi-bin/merc ... ry_Code=IC

And I bought it from the seller called "EZ-Drop" for $25 shipped.

[2713ddddavid]

I posted a couple of post back about my success with this adapter. I let "Purple Computing" know about the adapter working and what I was using it for. I even gave him a link to the MS site (FAQ page) .
Well check out what he did for us.
http://pfranc.com/usb/megasquirt-megatune.htm
I thought this was pretty cool of him.

[superchargingmachine]

Ok - just read this whole sticky.

My "new" computer is a Dell Latitude L400 without a serial port running WinXP.

I bought a USB to Serial adaptor from TigerDirect no brand name but the driver says Prolific.

I tried the driver disk driver with no luck. Downloaded the latest driver with no luck. Set FIFO rec and trans buffers to 1 no luck. Checked the common.ini and writeblocks was off and interwrite delay was set to 1.

Is there anything else to try? Or should I just buy the PCMIA serial port card?

It did come with a docking station and the serial port on that works fine, just too big to haul around.

It seems funny somehow that the old Win95 P100 machine worked great for sooo long.

[Tchao]

What COM is it?
I installed the CD and need to know how MT will find it.

Thanks
San

MT-2.25
MS-I

[Tchao]

Alright, I had a wireless mouse in the USB also, unplugged it and it read COM4 but it still doesnt connect.

San