On Wednesday 15 December 2010 11:31:51 Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 17:47 +0530, jtd wrote:
nice to see that jtd is slowly moving into the 21st century - maybe by 2020 he will phase out his serial ports completely
Sorry to disappoint, but my latest automation system (automates the house, with touch screen, media server, media players, light , AC control etc) uses serial ;-E
dinasaurs became extinct because they could not adapt ;-)
The dinos are doing quite well - as birds. In passing, the predecessors of the dinos, the crocs, and their predecessors the turtles are having a ball. So with a little bit of wool we may conclude that predecessors of valves - mechanical switches will do very well in the future. I am talking of optical computing. And fibre optic links. Both of which use micro mecahnical switches.
USB is meant for bulk bursty data. It is overkill for low speed (like gps data), and a poor performer for sustained through puts, or long cables. Apart from that, usb devices for embedded systems was horrendously buggy (Nagarjuna did the serial-to-usb dongle work yesterday?) and adds Rs.500 to the cost.
So usb is bad on costs for the gps case. USB is horrible for the automation case of long cables.
Also USB to serial are now available easily once again.