Subject: RE: Systems Enhancement Corporation Power Administrator 800

From: "Hills, Paul" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Jun 6 14:07:42 2003

Of course there is no "standard" 9-pin serial connector, except what has
become standard just by virtue of mass usage on the PC. The original IBM PC
had standard 25 pin connectors of course. Even that serial port was not a
standard RS232, since the RS232 standard also has a second serial link on
pins 14 and 16, along with all the control signals for the secondary link,
which the PC didn't have (as far as I'm aware). I've never seen an RS232
comms link fully populated and used to the standard though!

It is unlikely that any other equipment would conform to the PC world's
9-pin 'standard' unless it is quite new. Most recent test equipment tends to
use the 25 pin connector if it has a serial port at all. The standard for
test equipment (and probably UPSs as well) is GPIB (IEEE-488) which is
parallel.

paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Tothwolf [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: 05 June 2003 21:22
To: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: Systems Enhancement Corporation Power Administrator 800

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Feldman, Robert wrote:

> It might be that the DE-9's don't have a standard PC serial pinout. At
> work, we have a UPS that uses a DE-9 for programming, but the pinout on
> the cable (a 940-0024C; Googling produces a number of hits) is
>
> Female 	Male
> 1-4
> 2------------2
> 3------------1
> 5------------6
> 6 NC
> 7-8
> 9 NC

Let me guess...APC? :)

Their ports are very fun, since if you plug in a standard serial cable,
and open the port, it can turn off the UPS. The UPS' port supports both a
dump-mode DTR/RTS/etc signaling as well as a smart-mode.

The cable above is their "smart" cable. The 1-4 and 7-8 connections are
also not needed if you are not using 3rd party software such as NUT, as
they are just loop back connections.

-Toth

---

From: [email-masked] (Tony Duell)
Date: Fri Jun 6 17:13:09 2003

> become standard just by virtue of mass usage on the PC. The original IBM PC

Agreed. Around the time of the PC/AT, several other manufacturers used 
DE9s for the (cut-down) RS232 port. Often, pins 2-8 had the same 
functions as on the DB25, with pins 1 and 9 of the DE9 being DTR and RI 
in some order.

The HP110 ('Portable') and Portable+ do this -- here's the wirelist of 
the serial cable I made up for my machines ..

HP110                 RS232 DTE
DE9-P                 DB25-P

     Shield-------------o 1   Prot Gnd
1 o---------Br----------o 20  DTR
2 o---------R-----------o 2   TxD
3 o---------O-----------o 3   RxD
4 o---------Y-----------o 4   RTS
5 o---------Gn----------o 5   CTS
6 o---------Bu----------o 6   DSR
7 o---------Pu----------o 7   Sig Gnd
8 o---------Gy----------o 8   CD
9 o---------Bk----------o 22  RI

> comms link fully populated and used to the standard though!

Nor have I. And also most manufactures totally abuse the handshake lines 
-- you're not supposed to use them for flow control, for example. Watch 
out for manufacturers who attempt to adhere to the standard here -- their 
devices work with almost nothing else :-). And I'd love to know what the 
designer of the HP82164 was thinking of -- some of the features of that 
device are plain _crazy_!

-tony