This company runs a very small spice blending business and use a 100lb platform scale hooked up to a laptop running some weight management software.
The scale itself was shipped with a COM serial port but with some ingenuity the former tech guy spliced in a USB male end and made it work for 4-5 years with this old laptop.
Laptop HD died so i'm trying to hook up a new device. We have a few Panasonic Toughbooks laying around (Toughbook FZ-G1 Tablet running Windows 7) but they only have the single USB port.
The owner remembers needing to use a USB to serial adapter driver to get the computer to recognize the scale as a COM instead of an 'Unknown USB Device'.
As of right now the scale will only recognize under the USB controllers, and not under COM. The software they use only recognizes COM.
In a perfect world, we could have just bought a SERIAL to USB adapter and used the given Driver to make it work. Now I have a spliced scale cord to USB- but shouldn't the driver still work?
Ive tried 3x different companys adapter drivers and I can't seem to get them to work. All three said successfully installed but don't make any difference in how the scale is treated when It gets plugged in. (I have uninstalled/deleted the old drivers before trying a new one)
I'm not at all sure how USB/COM ports work, I just need this USB to be recognized as a COM port so I can rename/reclass it as COM 1 so the software can use it.
Any ideas at all? My Googlefu only brings up issues where people can already see their device listed under COM.
The scale itself was shipped with a COM serial port but with some ingenuity the former tech guy spliced in a USB male end and made it work for 4-5 years with this old laptop.
Laptop HD died so i'm trying to hook up a new device. We have a few Panasonic Toughbooks laying around (Toughbook FZ-G1 Tablet running Windows 7) but they only have the single USB port.
The owner remembers needing to use a USB to serial adapter driver to get the computer to recognize the scale as a COM instead of an 'Unknown USB Device'.
As of right now the scale will only recognize under the USB controllers, and not under COM. The software they use only recognizes COM.
In a perfect world, we could have just bought a SERIAL to USB adapter and used the given Driver to make it work. Now I have a spliced scale cord to USB- but shouldn't the driver still work?
Ive tried 3x different companys adapter drivers and I can't seem to get them to work. All three said successfully installed but don't make any difference in how the scale is treated when It gets plugged in. (I have uninstalled/deleted the old drivers before trying a new one)
I'm not at all sure how USB/COM ports work, I just need this USB to be recognized as a COM port so I can rename/reclass it as COM 1 so the software can use it.
Any ideas at all? My Googlefu only brings up issues where people can already see their device listed under COM.