Meatballman

Howdy, I have a bit of a dilemma to ask you all about. I have an old Laptop (Fujitsu P120) that I am using with good success in my car. Very small, built in DC power supply, all the good stuff. My problem is that when I was planning to use a desktop for the project, I bought a Matrix Orbital Serial LCD display. I control my player with the IRman. The Laptop unfortunately has only one serial port. I don't want to toss the display because it is very nice and cost me $100. Is there any way to run two devices on the same serial port and virtualize the com port, or possible get the IRman to run on the PS/2 port? Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks

Meatballman

MP3Car.com

 

AVGeek

check out www.mobileplanet.com as they sell PC Cards that allow you to add serial ports to your laptop.

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Meatballman

Yeah, but they cost $139.95. I can buy a parallel LCD for less than that. I was hoping for a low cost solution like software or an adapter.

[This message has been edited by Meatballman (edited 04-14-2000).]

ToxicPoison

I'm pretty sure they sell parallel->serial converters.
Check yer local computer store.

Necare

Sorry parallel->serial converters are not cheap its much more than just a physical difference the convert would be have to translate the 1 bit at a time of serial to 1 byte of parallel...abput your only option is to use a switch

lifter

They sell USB to serial adapters. Evation is also coming out with a USB version of the IRMan.

Meatballman

Which would be great if I had any usb ports....thanks anyway though

GR1NCH

I had the same problem... one serial port that I wanted to hook two devices to, an LCD and a Remote. What I decided on instead, was using a gamepad device from microsoft which I dont really use to play any games with. Using some software you can grab off of Microsoft's site, you can add all sorts of key macros. That combined with a keyboad plugin, should work pretty well, and took no additional space because it pluged into the soundcard. This won't work though if your laptop doesn't have a gameport.

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MP3Car.com