The Ol' Serial Cables

Hey guys. I have been practicing my programming with a BASIC Stamp Board of Education. However, it needs a serial cable to program it with. I have been using the desktop for this. However, I am looking forward to buying a laptop for college, and my BS that I'm looking forward is Aerospace Engineering. I realize that I need to program alot, so do you guys know any laptops that have a serial port on it? My budget is under $1500. I've been looking around, and so far, the buisness ones have them, and most of the ones at IBM have them. However, the downside is that they have a 6-cell battery.

I wonder if you can customize the HP dv2500t Wireless Broadband Series
14", 12-cell battery to have a serial port.

Then again, I saw a USB alternative in the parallax website, but the point is, is that they will still use serial ports for programming anything in the future, right, or is everything going USB?

 

By buisness ones, I mean the two different types of laptops for home, and for buisness.

 

Serial ports are dead. If you really need to use one, there are usb to serial cables.

 

Kay. Thanks.

Hey, tell me why though. I mean, I don't understand it technically. Please use layman's terms.

So, all programmable hardware uses USB to get the programming script?

 

Inputs on programmable hardware are going to vary depending on when it was built. Serial (and parallel) was generally replaced by USB.

 

Serial is just to slow, one bit at a time. Desktops still use them for connecting to Cisco routers, but thats about it. You still have the option of using a docking station with a laptop since they offer that port on some of them.

 

Serial just doesn't make sense on modern hardware due to the sweeping improvements in transfer technology. We can do it faster and more conveniently with USB. Certain technologies still use serial, but I consider those eccentric situations, *Cisco Routers*.

 

Thanks. Now I understand.

 

I bought an el cheapo USB to Serial adapter off eBay that worked great for connecting a USB only modern laptop to a computer guided telescope mount.
Never drops a connection and is stable for hours.
If you need one, dont bother paying $60+ for some of the models I've seen, just grab a cheap one off eBay, they work great. (In XP anyways, no clue about Vista)

 

USB to serial converters are still somewhat problematic. And they don't work under DOS, which is an issue if your software runs under DOS.

Microcontrollers and FPGA's will continue to use RS-232 for a *long* time for development purposes -- USB just isn't practical.

The number of cells a battery has is irrelevant; the more important metric is battery life and watt hours stored by the battery.

Avionics-related stuff will continue to use RS-232 for decades to come as its a reliable, mature protocol (or maybe RS-485, for its noise rejection characteristics due to differential drivers) -- so I don't think you should pin your hopes on using USB. Get yourself a proper serial port and move on with life.