8-Port RS-232/485 Serial Communications Interface

The DNA/DNR-SL-508-892 are 8-port serial communications interfaces for Cube/RACKtangle I/O chassis respectively. The boards offer fully isolated software-configurable RS-232 or RS-485 interfaces. The board is an ideal interface to serial based data acquisition and control interfaces as well as general purpose serial I/O.

The DNA/DNR-SL-508-892 support standard serial transfer rates up to 1 Mbaud in RS-485 mode or up to 256 kbaud in RS-232 mode. It also supports communications at 12, 12.5 and 50 kbaud with better than 0.1% data rate accuracy. Baud rates based on integer divisors of 4.125 MHz or 1.8415 MHz are also supported. Based upon an industry standard UART on each port, the board supports both half- and full-duplex modes for RS-422/485 operation.

The DNA/DNR-SL-508-892 are compatible with RS-422 point to point or network applications when used in RS-485 mode and provide 200Ω software-selectable TX and/or RX termination for RS-485 communications.

In RS-232 mode, the layer provides TX/RX as well as the standard RTS and CTS hardware hand shaking required by many external serial devices.

The DNA/DNR-SL-508-892 are supported by the UEIDAQ Framework providing a simple and complete software interface to all popular programming languages, operating systems and data acquisition and control applications (e.g. LabVIEW, DASYLab, MATLAB).

The DNA/DNR-SL-508-892 includes the UEI-RSS serial server. This server allows a Windows or Linux host PC to configure the DNA/DNR-SL-508 ports as standard serial ports within the host OS (e.g. as COM1: to COM255: ports in Windows or standard POSIX functions in Linux). The UEI-RSS supports up to 255 unique serial ports per Ethernet port on the host.