USB Programming cables

[CanaanP 1]

Has anyone had any experience with these or know if they do or do not work? http://store.mrplc.com/Allen-Bradley--USB-1747-CP3_p_9.html http://store.mrplc.com/Allen-Bradley--USB-...-PM02_p_23.html I have a laptop running Windows 7 and am currently using a virtualbox with XP SP3 for all my RA software, using a keyspan usb serial adapter but because of the way virtualbox is setup, I must have that keyspan adapter plugged in just to run that virtualbox, or it will cause an error. Which means I can't open it for any other purpose unless I have that darn thing plugged in. These cables would be a nice alternative if they work. Thanks in advance for any information...

[JesperMP 2]

Hi canaanP. How about VMware in stead of virtualbox. VMware supports effortlessly hot plugging and unplugging of USB devices. At least all the ones I have tried. I havent exactly tried the two that you link to, but I do use it with a cheap comercial USB-to-serial adapter.

[paulengr 44]

There are a couple ways around this. First, you can host the USB/serial support on the Windows 7 side. Then the COM port appears as a hardware port on the virtual machine side of things. You need a named pipe to do this. See chapter 3 of the Virtualbox manual on how to set this up and sources for freeware named pipes that you will need. This bypasses the proxy driver/server that Virtualbox normally uses for capturing USB devices. Second, Virtualbox is at version 3.2. They may have fixed this in newer versions (not sure here). Third, you could just create two virtual machines but point them to the same virtual hard drive. Not as convenient obviously but it gets the job done. Fourth, you could get rid of that annoying host operating system. I've been running XP SP3 on a Ubuntu host for a while using Virtualbox and haven't encountered any problems other than the fact that Windows takes forever to boot (although doing a simple stop/restart of the virtual machine is a LOT faster than actually booting Windows). Since Microsoft requires you to run Windows in a virtual machine now for compatibility reasons, the last and final reason for using Windows (compatibility) is now a non-issue since you are virtualizing everything regardless of the host operating system.

[CanaanP 1]

Hey Paul, I should have been more clear but I am hosting the device on the host side, but as a host device, not host pipe. I have seen flaky results using the host pipe method, where the little light on the keyspan blinks as if there is an error or something, yet sometimes it works fine. That is why I switched to the host device method. If I pass it through to the guest os as a usb device, the same issue occurs. The guest os acts fine as far as loading the driver and such but the same issue occurs with the device itself... I guess there's something about the way it's being handled that it does like. Anyway, the host device method seems to be very solid. I also enjoy doing the start/stop of the guest os, but that is also part of the problem... if I run without the usb serial adapter and save the state and quit, then later I need to use it, I have to discard the machine state and boot from scratch. No bid deal really, but I was just wondering if the solution to all these problems could be made by just buying a $45 cable and plug it in whenever I need and hit the ground running. I am using virtualbox 3.2.2, with newest guest additions. Thanks for the feedback though.

[CanaanP 1]

I have thought about VMWare but I was attracted to virtualbox because it's open source. I was just at the logic conference in KC the other day, and a lot of people were talking about vmware, and we may end up going with that... but so far in my little company I have just been experimenting with vm's on my own on the side. This is not yet an official policy or anything in my company.