RS232 Splitter

[Dotnet]

Hello all,

Thanks in advance for any answers posted.

Scenario

I have a customer who have just split their 'logical' infrastructure in two (Hotel and Timeshare). There is one building physical building with a common telephone infrastructure.

I therefore have to split data from the existing telephone PBX (GDK 186) to two PC's so that the two 'departments' are able to log the PBX's data independantly. (Software on both machines are able to filter out the various apartment numbers etc from the PBX's data stream).

I have purchased a unit from 'BlackBox' which is advertsed as a '4 port RS232 databuffer box' and is supposedly able to output data at different rates on all/any of it's ports - it doesn't -it mirrors the data to two ports not store or buffer

Question

Does anyone know of a unit which is able to take RS232 data and ouput it on two ports (ideally at different baud rates) or store the data in a FIFO format and then output the data when either/or the port(s) are ready for it. i.e. if a PC on port 1 is turned off store the data untill its turned on again whilst the PC on port 2 still receives data upto the limit of memory.

Alternatively, I would imagine a modern microcontroller with multiple(3) RS232 ports could suffice with some clever programming

The baud is 9600 and no more than 20 (ish) characters in length at any one (time of call, length of call apartment number) there are 80 rooms/apartment in total

Cheers
Dotnet

 

[philba]

is this pbx producing the data in a continuous logging fashion - spitting it out as the calls come in or go out? I assume it is - that's how mine does it.

You could look at serial data loggers. I haven't seen any with multiple output ports.

a micro with 3 serial ports and sufficient storage could be made to work.

alternatively, if there is room for a PC, you could set it up with extra serial ports, write a little program that stores the data coming in on the pbx port and then spits it out on the other two ports when some condition is reached on the other end (i.e. a machine ready for input). Of course, a cooler solution would be to make the PC drop it into a webformat and allow the use of a web browser to get the data. In either case, I'd run linux on it.

 

[justDIY]

why does the data need to be output at different rates on each port? is one of the PC's incredibly slow in comparison to the other?

the call accounting sw we use for our pbx isn't very complex, but it does allow "departments" to be setup, and assigning extensions to those departments is fairly easy... why not setup each operation as a department, and just use one computer to log the data? Then hook up a printer, and schedule the sw to print nightly departmental reports ... one for the timeshares, one for the hotel.

it sounds like this problem is more of a human programming issue (training the managers to not be so lazy), than a technical one

 

[Paul Obrien]

You will probably find that the PBX outputs and doesn't expect any input, Ihave physically split a rs232 signal to got to multiple receivers, so long as there isn't a big voltage difference between boxs it may work.