[time-nuts] Could someone please recommend GPIB card

[Jim Lux]

On 10/9/11 7:11 PM, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R wrote:
> The PCI and USB HPib interfaces I've seen are terribly expensive.
> Wpuld it be possible to fake an interface with a parallel port and bit
> banging?
> Possibly an Arduino?
>

Sure... but surplus NI cards turn up pretty cheap, and the Prologix and 
equivalent widgets aren't all that expensive.  By the time you take an 
Arduino and put it in a box with a power supply, etc  (And buy that 
darned connector), I'll bet you're pretty close to the $150 cost of a 
Prologix USB box.  And, then you still have to do the programming, which 
is non-trivial if you want to support the entire protocol (I did part of 
a IEEE-488 interface with a Z80 some decades ago.. It's 1 Mbyte/sec and 
you really do need to support all the handshaking properly.)  I imagine 
you could probably do a fairly decent job with a FPGA that has a USB 
interface.  But then, you're still in the $50-100 board range and still 
needing the connector, power supply, and box.


There are, of course, ISA cards around for $20-30, but finding drivers, 
etc is going to be a chore (of course, that DOS machine with ISA bus 
you're running it in probably does have the needed 5.25" disk drive for 
the driver)

I guess it depends on whether you want so spend your time building GPIB 
interfaces or doing whatever you need the GPIB interface for.