Never Trust the Manual - Printable Version +- HP Forums (https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum) +-- Forum: Not HP Calculators (/forum-7.html) +--- Forum: Not remotely HP Calculators (/forum-9.html) +--- Thread: Never Trust the Manual (/thread-20555.html) |
Never Trust the Manual - toml_12953 - 09-27-2023 03:26 AM I have a Sharp PC-E500S calculator with a CE-130T RS-232C Level Converter and a CE-515P Plotter/Printer. The manuals describe the cable necessary to connect the plotter to the calculator via the serial port. I made a cable using those specs and tested each end to make sure the proper pins were connected. I hooked up the cable and tried to print. Garbage printed. I checked the baud, parity, bits and stop bits and they were all set properly. I hooked the plotter to a PC with the parallel interface and it printed properly. I then tried hooking up the three wires from the printer's DIN connector (data, ground and wait) to a DB-25 connector in all sorts of ways. Finally, I got the printer to print the way it should. The pins I had to connect weren't the same as in the manual. If the manuals had been correct, this would've been simple! Instead, I wasted hours checking everything over and over and tearing out what little hair I have left. I've been working with communications equipment since about 1978 and I've never had such a fight! RE: Never Trust the Manual - brouhaha - 09-27-2023 05:45 AM I've been tearing out what little hair I have fighting C++ and library issues in a new simulator I'm writing. Everything causing my grief is fully documented, but C++ and the standard library are very complicated (1840 pages in the C++20 standard, 2134 pages in C++23). So arguably I have the opposite problem: correct documentation, but too much of it! :-) I don't ersonally have the PC-E500S, more's the pity, but if it's not too much trouble, if you could make the correct information available, it would probably help other folks who do. RE: Never Trust the Manual - toml_12953 - 09-27-2023 10:45 AM (09-27-2023 05:45 AM)brouhaha Wrote: I've been tearing out what little hair I have fighting C++ and library issues in a new simulator I'm writing. Everything causing my grief is fully documented, but C++ and the standard library are very complicated (1840 pages in the C++20 standard, 2134 pages in C++23). So arguably I have the opposite problem: correct documentation, but too much of it! And let other people miss out on all the fun? Of course. That's a good idea. Here it is: RE: Never Trust the Manual - Jeff_Birt - 09-27-2023 12:16 PM Other than the non-conventional naming of /DATA and /BUSY the table from the manual is correct. RE: Never Trust the Manual - toml_12953 - 09-27-2023 02:24 PM (09-27-2023 12:16 PM)Jeff_Birt Wrote: Other than the non-conventional naming of /DATA and /BUSY the table from the manual is correct. Yes but I added the DB-25 and DE-9 columns. The pin numbers originally called for in the manual were totally different and could never work. |