There was a point where I really wanted a decent laptop with one to run STAR C3. Never bought the laptop nor the kit but never knew if I’ll need it again. I don’t own a Benz anymore but it could literally change on a whim because I do still love them lol
And how cool would you look carrying your laptop like an attache case, with dongles and wires hanging off it? No thank you. If I need to interface with cold war era serial hardware, this is the way I’m going to do it.
People have reported those not working very well with STAR / DAS I believe. You can usually buy the kit with a laptop included, I just figured I’d wanna try if it runs on something made less than 23 years ago.
It has an RS232 port, that’s hilarious.
I use that port more than my usb ports at work, no kidding. You don’t know how many things still use that port to communicate even today.
Oh, I’m aware, I work on fire alarm systems.
There was a point where I really wanted a decent laptop with one to run STAR C3. Never bought the laptop nor the kit but never knew if I’ll need it again. I don’t own a Benz anymore but it could literally change on a whim because I do still love them lol
You can get USB to RS232 cables for very little, so any laptop should work.
And how cool would you look carrying your laptop like an attache case, with dongles and wires hanging off it? No thank you. If I need to interface with cold war era serial hardware, this is the way I’m going to do it.
You do realise there is equipment being manufactured today that uses RS232?
We have brand new machines that use RS232 and RS485. We just did some configurating on one of them last week.
So do some fire panels, come to think of it. They use RS232 for programming, and either RS232 or RS485 for communication between modules.
Yep. Coincidentally, part of that job involved a fire panel.
It falls under the KISS principal - and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Oh, definitely. There’s a lot of products in the fire industry that haven’t fundamentally changed since the 80s or 90s, maybe a few tweaks.
People have reported those not working very well with STAR / DAS I believe. You can usually buy the kit with a laptop included, I just figured I’d wanna try if it runs on something made less than 23 years ago.