Slightly Sensible - B&B Insider

Goodbye to RS-232, Part IV

  

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We’re three weeks into 2012 and picking up another minute of glorious daylight every day. Wonderful.

But winter isn’t over just yet, and today I’m fresh off the sledding hill. I spent the afternoon participating in every variety of sledding carnage that you could possibly imagine. Kids from five to fifty turned themselves into human bowling pins and Weeble wobbles. It was great fun. As I sit here recovering, thawing my pinky toe over the fire and letting the day’s bruises settle in, I thought I’d share a few thoughts that have been rattling around in my noggin.

First, let me ask you this: How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding up?

Back in seventh grade a well-meaning Ms. Patten insisted that we write down three New Year’s resolutions. Someone in your own life has surely insisted that you to do the same. Optimism is a beautiful thing.

I’ve never met anyone who isn’t expert at dreaming up goals; any nit can do it. The real challenge is achieving something new. To achieve something new, you have to do something new. That means change, and we humans are rarely wired for it.

Goodbye RS-232, Act IV

Friday afternoon I found myself in the midst of a futile search for an important scrap of paper on my hopelessly chaotic desk. The elusive scrap contained my notes on a recent market study of the RS-232 and RS-485 chip markets. It said that the five-year forecast was for continued growth in those chip sales.

That made me smile. I travel in some geeky circles, and many of the people I know have been predicting the death of the serial port for more than a decade. In fact, it has been nearly a decade since EE Product News editor Joe Desposito penned a soulful article lamenting the loss of serial ports on his PC, calling it the end of an era. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ve probably noticed that I have my own opinions about that.

It has turned out that serial ports are not only moving into their fourth decade – sixth, for RS-232 – but that their numbers are continuing to grow at a prodigious rate. Somewhere around one billion more of them are expected to be deployed in just the next couple of years. In the electronics world, that’s immortality. RS-232 and RS-485 may not have the same sex appeal as wireless, but they’re certainly aging well.

What does all of this say about device connectivity? Among other things, it says that the need for serial ports is no longer driven by PCs.

I’ve always been enamored with everything involving the connectivity of specialized and remote devices. There’s hardly a device on the planet that I can’t find a way to connect and integrate into a system. The most interesting and challenging connections are made way out there at the very edge of the network; things like remote sensors, for example. And those are precisely the kinds of applications that are driving the demand for RS-232 and RS-485.

So, as my pinky toe regains its color over the fire, I’m playing mental Twister and considering how some of my recent applications and solutions have been a part of that demand.

How about gas pumps? Nearly all of the pumps in the US and most of the pumps in Europe use serial communications. If you have a car and a credit card you’ve fueled up at a station where your information not only traveled through a serial port, it traveled through a B&B Electronics serial server that connected the serial ports to the franchise’s local and wide area network.

The treadmills on the international space station use B&B Electronics equipment to connect their serial ports to the local data network. That network’s space-to-ground, point-to-point data link carries B&B Electronics’ bits and bytes all the way back to Earth. Not bad.

Have you ever seen a truck or van with the telltale dome on its cab that holds its array of cellular and GPS antennas? It’s highly probable that their mobile WAN depends upon some clever piece of engineering from B&B Electronics. We help move the bits and bytes that allow fleet owners to monitor everything from vehicle data to driver behavior.

The healthcare industry uses lots of fancy stuff too. Have you ever known anyone who benefited from the use of a mobile MRI unit? You guessed it -- B&B Electronics’s solutions helped it happen. Fetal monitor? Kidney dialysis machine? Same story.

Have you ever had bodywork done on your car? There’s a better than 50 percent chance that getting a perfect color match depended upon the flow of B&B Electronics-enabled bits and bytes.

Got a newer furnace or AC unit in your house? Were you surprised when the tech pulled out a laptop instead of a pair of vice grips? Yup – B&B Electronics was there too.

Watch for the newest B&B Electronics product solutions guide in your mailbox this week. If you’re not already on our mailing list, click here to request a product solutions guide.

Data connectivity has expanded into many new environments over the years. I wonder what New Year’s resolutions Ms. Patten would have written for the serial port, way back in 1983.

Talk back below.

Happy (Frosty) Connections,

Mike Fahrion