USB to serial adapter for iBook

I think my question is identical to Susan's and would like to piggy-back on hers, if that's appropriate. Apologies to you, Susan, if I've created a faux pas.

I have an old ImageWriter II and would like to use it with my new IBook running Tiger.

If it's doable, what do I need (hardware and drivers) and where do I get it?

Thanks

Darrel

Susan:

Take a look at
Noel Sisson, "Stylewrter driver for tiger ??", 12:40pm May 31, 2005 CDT
Ignore the fact this was in a discussion on Tiger - it also applies to you.

The only adapter I can recommend is the Keyspan "USB Twin Serial Adapter". It will cost you over half of what you will spend on an inexpensive brand new inkjet printer. Furthermore, setting up that brand-new inkjet printer will take you only a few seconds. Following the advice provided in the article I linked to above (for getting Stylewriters to work with new Macs and OS X) will leave you bald after you tear all your hair out in the process of making it work 🙂

In all seriousness...please follow my advice and retire that Stylewriter.

Darrel Walker:

You will need:

1. a Keyspan "USB Twin Serial Adapter"
2. the drivers at http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/imagewriter/
3. the encouraging advice at http://my.vbe.com/~mbrought/serial_printing.html

Darrel Walker:

You will need:

1. a Keyspan "USB Twin Serial Adapter"
2. the drivers at http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/imagewriter/
3. the encouraging advice at http://my.vbe.com/~mbrought/serial_printing.html

People have valid reasons for wanting to be able to use an impact printer, and if this applies to you then all this effort is worth the trouble.

I'm interested in this topic also.. I have an old Garmin GPS unit that I would like to try with my iBook G4. It has a 9 pin serial interface that can use either ordinary serial comms or NMEA data. Has anyone tried something like this before?

Finding a USB-to-serial adapter that works with a standard DB-9 RS232 serial port is not too difficult (Keyspan sells such an adapter). The bigger problem is whether you can find OS X software that will still support this device - and I suspect that lack of such software would kill this project.

Funny enough now that I think about it, I'm sure there's plenty of quite capable unix commandline serial terminals out there. I know enough of C and some other languages and one day I could even consider tackling it myself. It really would depend on how seamlessly the usb to serial converter operates at low level.. All I'd be using it for would be to dump recorded trips to a textfile, but I don't really have that much need for it anyway.

Henry,

Thanks for your quick response and encouraging words. Your advice is exactly what I had hoped to find. I'll follow up on your 2 site references right away.

Darrel