Simpson36,
I have both but have been working with the USB Pokey for my pendant.
Russ
Russ, thank you for the response.
I have the USB version of the PoKeys, but have never used it. I planned to purchase the Ethernet version, but the functionality that it provides is already available to my application thru the Ethernet interfaced Arduino DUE processor that I use.
The Arduino DUE continues to be able to handle the ever increasing loads I am putting on it, but in the event it stalls, I have the new Rasberry processor in a box waiting to be pressed into service if needed.
The USB version of anything has two ways of interfacing with a PC. One is as a native USB device and the other far more common (unfortunately) method is via a single chip 'converter', the most popular of which is made by FTDI, to emulate an old serial COM port.
ALL COM emulators require drivers and It is reasonable to assume that the driver would have FIFO buffers to emulate any modern UART chip.
Note that I do not
know if this is the case or not with any particular device, but I do think it is a reasonable assumption, which if true, would result in the same behavior that I described in an earlier post. Characters are trapped in the buffer and released when MACH4 starts and accesses the buffer without first flushing the buffer. Again, that is pure speculation, but with a basis.
I can add that MACH4 is derelict in initializing a number of processes, not just serial plug-ins. The screen does not initialize properly in that any custom buttons are in a completely random condition on start-up regardless of the initial state of the control.
It has been suggested by another post that code would need to be added to the PLC to properly initialize MACH4, but I strongly disagree with that premise. I have had the last 9 or 10 questions go unanswered on this forum and developer participation seems to have pretty much ended. This seems to me to be heading for a repeat of the MACH3 norm of never ending unfixed and unacknowledged issues.
If that turns out to be the case, and extensive programming is needed to make MACH4 do what it should do out-of-the-box, I would be more inclined to follow the lead of others and abandon MACH4 in favor of the Kflop or Unix solutions.