Excellent product with equal customer service
Excellent product with equal customer service. I really can't say enough good things about these serial to USB adapters or Sealevel as a company. Our project requires the timing of a range of precision custom sensors. They were for a long time reported to a DOS based computer with enough actual physical ports to grab all the needed data. As time has gone on all these systems are now EOL and need replacing but finding systems with dedicated serial ports at all is nearly impossible and finding them in the highest quality boards needed for data collection in harsh field conditions (hummidity, heat, cold, dust) is impossible. We started our testing by going with these junk serial converters from some Chinese knock-off firm. They were cheap (around 10 bucks per serial port) but were more trouble then they were worth. Even getting them running was a pain, I probably wasted a couple of thousand bucks in my own time just with the problems they caused, live and learn I guess. When we start to move out to actual field testing we bought a higher quality part from a know manufacture who I will not name. They were good up to a point, but if you exceeded 8 serial ports the drivers could no longer handle the load, they were also less then helpful at tech support. We ended up needing to make lots of virtual machine instances of windows and sending each USB port to one instance. This let us get up and running but required that you start the computer, start the VMs then plug each serial port into a specific USB port so you didn't mess up the mapping. It was a total mess. After magooing my way though our busy season I decided we needed to find a better way. That is when we switched to the Sealevel systems. First off , I got even the most technical questions I threw at their engineers and sales people answered not only promptly but more importantly correctly and this was before I had purchased a single unit from them. After receiving the first unit the drivers for the older serial cards had messed up my windows install (I didn't know this at the time) I called and was given a near super human effort by their support people to get it working without doing a total wipe and reinstall. After getting it working we have found nothing but good things with these boxes. Some examples: The drivers are great, I have found no upper limit yet on port per computer (I have 16 at the moment though I hear they max out somewhere around 256). There is an easy and straight forward way to find out every ports current physical location on the box. IE com13 = port8 Indicator lights for what port is set to RS-232 and RS-422. They have excellent latency, we thought we had to live with a 30ms difference between our DOS system and the new USB system because of overhead. The Sealevel units quashed this down to a negligible 5ish ms. They come in a rugged metal shell and have been sitting baking in the Tx sun and humidity for the last 2 months (summer 2012) with no known problems. They have also been operating great in extreme vibration situations. The sealatch connectors are a god send. All in all these are great boxes, I won't lie they are a bit on the expensive side but I can honestly say I probably lost 3x the price difference of these boxes in man hours trying to get cheaper options working.
