I'm attempting to connect a device (syringe pump) to my computer. The device itself is pretty old, so the original cable was lost at some point. I've tried looking for a new cable but with no success. I've also tried to search the web (for ~3 hours) to find an adapter or a schematics of such an adapter, so now I decided to do the adapter myself (with your generous and much appreciated help. Where do you recommend me to start the design stage? Any thoughts on the matter?
In general, the device address is set to 0 and the baud rate can be-- 300, 1200, 2400, 4800, or 9600.
Attached the pin out of the RJ 9 of the syringe pump and the standard pin out of RS 232.
Thank you for your reply, I don't mean to doubt the pin out above, but are you sure I don't need to have a buffer as the serial port needs to get signals to receive/transmit? Just a thought. I plan to use LabVIEW to communicate with the pump, I'll pass command strings to it....
On your pump pinout they only use 3 lines. Ground, Transmit and Receive. So from your RS232 DB9 Pin 5 is Ground and goes to Ground, Pin 2 is Receive and goes to Transmit and Pin 3 is Transmit and goes to Receive. So that is how the RJ9 on the pump should mate with the RS232 of the computer. I would have suggested Hyper Terminal but since you have Lab View that should work. While not familiar with your pump that is how I do it to communicate with devices.
I've tried the setup, connecting data in to pin 2 and pin 3 (tried both ways), and something odd happens. The syringe pump shows that it's connected but when I try to use Hyper terminal or Labview I get a run time error (device doesn't respond). Any suggestions on how to proceed?
Well it looks like you have communication. The error sounds like what it says. I don't know what the pump should be sending. This stuff is far from my forte too. Are you choosing the correct comm port?