Bruce, I've found that the serial ports on a lot of new PCs should be called "Modem ports" because they don't work with anything but a modem. The board makers seem to be getting sloppy with the voltages and timing. The system I run my TINIs with is a FIC SD-11 system board, and it's one and only serial port will not communicate with a TINI, or a DS2450 demo kit, or my PDA, or my PIC-IDE board, or my Z86E001ZEM Z86 emulator, or, oh well you get the idea. I wound up with a USB-->dual serial adapter and everybody is happy with it. The serial port on the system board is within RS-232 specs regarding voltages, but not even close to +/- 12v that was the de-facto standard if not the legal one.

Tom Wyckoff

Courtesy mail: To all those that kindly tried to help me get my system running.

Finally I got it to work. Mainly I found out (2 weeks) the hard way that my IBM ThinkPad has a config program that takes control of pretty much everything on this machine. So after a lot of trial and error I decided that nothing was wrong with anything but my machine. Guess what?!?! I was right. The management prog was keeping the port (COM1 closed).

To make a long story short today was a day of successes. I got my temperature iButton to work and my TINI to work! Now I can finally focus on my goal. Thanks!

Jose Maria Fernandes

Great! Glad you persisted. I have a notebook (NEC6233), and its serial port works OK with some devices but not others. My desktop PCs all work OK with everything.

Bruce Boyes