Larry Weinberg of PTS Electronics writes:
I am an electronics design engineer (schematics, circuit boards, firmware development) servicing the electronics community for 22 years. My computer is not your standard run-of-the-mill box. Among engineers and gamers, it is recognized as a very advanced system.
ABIT IT7 non-legacy motherboard, no serial, parallel, or PS2?but it does have 14 USB 2.0 ports. One Gig 3500 DDR (some bios mods to accommodate that), 533MHz FSB, dual boot Win98SE and WinXP Pro. Eight USB 2.0 devices connected including wireless keyboard and mouse and all used together.
This box gets a real workout.
It is CRITICAL that I have access to my programming station. Microchip makes the PIC chipset, widely recognized throughout the industry as the leader in microcontrollers. I use them in most designs I do for Fortune 500/1000 companies, the DOD (Department of Defense), and other clients’ products. I cannot afford to have glitches.
I tried numerous PCI-based Serial Adapter cards to no avail. The device I use MUST run from a serial port (no ifs, ands, or buts) for the Microchip Corporations PICStart Plus microcontroller programmer. The other adapters established communications and created a port, but NONE of them could handle the rough paced handshaking of a microcontroller programming station where one little glitch can ruin product development. The other adapters were fine for low end products like joysticks and printers, but I needed something industry rugged and FAST. There could be NO timing glitches. Microchip informed me that not even a Serial-to-USB adapter would work and they were skeptical about ANY adapter. I was at a total loss. Finally, in an engineers chat forum I heard good things about LAVA Adapters. Skeptical (I’d never heard of you and all the brand name recognized adapters had failed), I tried your board. I had nothing left to lose. IT WORKED. IT COST ME A $100 BET THAT IT WOULDN’T. Frankly, it’s the best hundred bucks I ever lost.
I have already informed my engineer friends at a major semiconductor manufacturer, and now they’re using them. I also informed Microchip Corp. and they were ECSTATIC. Now, finally, THEY had a solution they could pass to their customers.
Your product should NOT have worked in this system which vastly overpowers your product’s capability claims. I had no reason to expect it to work, but it did, and continues to do so effortlessly. The LAVA PCI SSerial 650 installed itself without effort on BOTH operating systems, and established a high-speed connection with my programmer. I have happy clients because I can continue to deliver firmware on schedule.
LAVA is bridging technologies to the non-legacy market. Thank you very VERY much.
Larry Weinberg,
PTS Electronics
541-582-6436
http://www.EEngineer.com
